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[.pdf]
Morton, Timothy. Ecology: Without Nature.
Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA
and London: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp.249.
Aristotle has famously posited that
"nature has made all
things specifically for the sake of man"
(Politics,
Bk.1. Ch.8). This is an anthropocentric formulation that
works under the assumption that nature is important and
valuable to the extent that it serves humans. Ecology
has long distanced itself from such man-centered views
of the so-called
"natural environment,"
going, at times,
to the other extreme by considering, for instance, that
(inanimate) nature must be revered because each plant or
stone allegedly has a personal(ized) soul therefore it
should be treated like a human person (traditional
animism); or simply by emphasizing a spiritual
interaction between man and mountain, the human and the
non-human, revealed through national or tribal rituals
and ceremonies (new animism). Thus, modern ecology seems
to fall into the trap of either objectifying nature,
which has devastating consequences or
"subjectifying"
it, that is, making it into something that, probably, is
not―a subject.
In Ecology: Without Nature, Timothy Morton
reshuffles the ecological cards by disengaging from a
discussion of the subject-object dichotomy in order to
concentrate on whatever lies in-between, a hazy realm
that he calls
"ambience."
"Ecological writing,"
he
argues,
"shuffles subject and object back and forth so
that we may think they have dissolved into each other,
though what we usually end up with is a blur"
called
ambience (15). The idea behind Morton's book is simple
but strangely enticing. Environmental studies and
ecological criticism place so much emphasis upon the
environment that from a certain point on it stops being
an
"environment."
By placing it at the center of all
discussions and practices we remove it from its natural
location, namely the surroundings or the margins.
Likewise, nature, in Morton's view, is so persistently
in the limelight today that it has, in a way, stopped
being natural insofar as it has started to conjure
metaphysical representations or notions like God or not
so metaphysical (but not absolutely physical, either)
concepts such as ecosystem. Nature, that is, as an
umbrella term that oscillates wildly between the divine
and the material hovers over things without becoming
those things. Nature rather hides behind an endless
series of metonymies, at the end of which it makes an
impressive entrance: grass, mountain, air,
heterosexuality...Nature. Morton believes that the only
way to override the barren metaphoricity and
abstractness of ecological thinking is to dispense with
the idea of nature altogether. In other words, to have
an ecological consciousness that does justice to nature,
we will just have to, paradoxically, let go of...nature
"as a transcendental term in a material mask,"
a term
that
"ironically impedes a proper relationship with the
earth and life-forms"
(14, 2). If nature is trivialized
by our constant references to it, by abolishing not only
the term but also its metaphysical representations, we
become able to preserve its ineffable mystery, thereby
doing justice to an ethical and ambient stance towards
the environment, a stance that breaks with the norms of
any environmental politics or program.
The author draws upon a number of philosophers and
thinkers
―Adorno, Kant, Lyotard, Freud, amongst others―
to critique environmental ethics by questioning
ecocritical aesthetics and more particularly the
kind of environmental writing that claims to take us to
the thing itself, raw nature as it really is, through a
reproduction of the feeling of being united with nature.
The cultural and historical platform upon which he
elaborates the (non)concept of ambience is
eighteenth to nineteenth-century British Romanticism.
This is a rather risky thing to do, considering that
Romanticism is almost by definition the culmination of
the ego, the subjectal I that constitutes, rather than
is constituted by, the world, an I used to flaunting
itself against the fuzzy background of the surrounding
atmosphere or natural environment. The author, to his
credit, has decided to let his own writing as
well as famous Romantic texts work against the grain and
norms of Romantic aesthetics. This can be easily
understood if we consider that his notions of
ambience and ecomimesis privilege the
dimension of encompassing space, which is
a-temporal and definitely poles apart from the
supposedly teleological nature of Romanticism that
privileges time and the
"sense of an ending"
(to
use the title of Frank Kermode's seminal book). Romantic
poets have utilized the environment as a pretext for
talking about themselves, a mirror that reflects back
their own emotions or, better, a magnifying glass that
enlarges those emotions. If Morton is correct, then,
Romantic poets must be un-ecological, unless he has an
ace up his sleeve and manages to prove that there are
more things at stake in Romantic aesthetics than
self-reflection and sheer subjectivity. In any case, he
does sound determined to show the dark and absolutely
ecological or ambient side of Romanticism by announcing
that the time has come to engage in Romantic
space/ambience in a more fruitful way, without, however,
rendering ambience the epicenter of attention.
The book declares very cogently that we should resist
nature as posited by Romanticism, that is, as a
transcendental rhetorical concept, and as extolled by
ecocriticism. Making a fetish out of nature creates an
aesthetic distance between us and it,
which leads to its objectification. The effect of
nature's objectification is its demystification, which,
in turn, takes us to the next level, that of its
violation. The underlying assumption here, as Morton
insinuates, is that the prerequisite for truly
respecting the environment is to be frightened by it. But
why is fear important and where did it go? According to Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of the Enlightenment,
the positivistic view of science and rationality
contributed to the presentation of nature and the world
as a domain governed by specific laws and processes that
can be easily explained and predicted. Under these
circumstances, nature was no longer dark, fearful and
mysterious but was rather reduced to an object that
could be studied and eventually tamed. Morton argues
that
"putting something called Nature on a pedestal and
admiring it from afar does for the environment what
patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a
paradoxical act of sadistic admiration"
(5). The
aesthetic distance created probably bore also on the
quality of Kantian beauty as the safe contemplation of a
natural view, as contrasted to the Sublime that would
evoke terror and generate respect for the surrounding
ambience. In a way, ecocritique (which is
preferable, in Morton's mind, to ecocriticism)
and the so-called ecomimesis (a term adjacent to
the Platonic conception of mimesis as
"the divinely
inspired form of madness"
rather than its Aristotelian
conception as
"imitation") favor a re-enchanting, or
re-mystification of the environment, which is sadly
disenchanted (demystified) thus objectified. The key is
to reassume, or resume, the mystery of the world. Morton
draws upon Adorno and his idea of
"sensuous immediacy"
towards nature. Precisely because, for Morton, we begin
to consume at the very minute that we start to admire,
when the distance between viewer and object dissolves,
we stop consuming and actually start interfering with
ambience without the mediation of our rational
faculties. Apparently, this interference should not
occur without at least some reluctance on the
part of the viewer, as there is always the danger of it
turning into a consistent, conscious, and conceptual
deed, which is Morton's biggest fear.
Ambient poetics
and ecomimesis are interchangeable terms in
Ecology: Without Nature. The author informs us that
ecomimesis―a poetic mimesis of our surroundings―puts a
lot of effort into simulating the dissolution of inside
and outside. The attempted dissolution is
"strictly
impossible,"
yet it is attempted all the same (67). The
"as if"
element of such a simulation (we do it as if
it were possible) assigns a literary tinge to Morton's
idea of the ecomimetic. In fact, ecomimesis is defined
by literature and the poetic―this is a book seething
with examples from literature and arts―while ambient
poetics represents the theory that advances
"a
materialist way of reading texts with a view to how they
encode the literal space of their inscription―if there
is such a thing―the spaces between the words, the
margins of the page, the physical and social environment
of the reader"
(3). In short, ambient poetics pays close
attention to the empty, unwritten, spaces as well as the
written ones, the margins as well as the centers, but,
it could be added, it also ensures that the margins
remain marginal and emptiness stays empty, otherwise
ambience is reduced to either flagrant exploitation of
nature or mediocre ecological didacticism. Wordsworth
touches upon ecomimesis in the poem
"There was a Boy"
by
hinting at the aesthetically appealing possibility that
when you make no sound, you can hear the absence
of sound. To hear the absence of sound is to become
capable of testifying to the existence of those margins
of the page, that long-lost emptiness upon which true
ecology is supposed to be founded.
One of the most intriguing ideas expressed in Morton's
project is that the environment itself is not natural
but inherently literary since, in order to exemplify
nature, we always resort to metaphors and poeticity.
Ecology without nature is an ecology that interrupts the
normal processes of comprehending the environment (37).
In a way, it defamiliarizes nature by presenting it as
literary environment rather than natural reality. By
extension, to discuss the environment properly we need
to become literary rather than realistic (31); in short,
we have to turn into ecomimetic creatures. But how do we
become ecomimetic? Allegedly, when we suddenly give up,
after an intensive observation of nature, ambience
"falls upon you in the form of unprecedented beauty"
(74). Thus, intensive observation is followed by some
kind of synaesthetic experience that comes to us later,
as a repetition or an echo―the author calls it
"re-mark,"
after Derrida. One would assume that Morton
means that if it were not experienced later but earlier,
as an originality rather than an echo, it would pertain
to the realm of consciousness, which looks only at the
center rather than the margin, the words rather than the
empty spaces and surrounding ambience around them. Ecomimesis and ambient poetics, argues Morton, are about
"making the imperceptible perceptible, the inaudible
audible"
(96). The problem is that the author has
already stated that should we bring the background into
the foreground, it stops being background. Attempting to
bring ambience into the foreground by making
positivistic statements like the one above only subverts
the ecomimetic ecology that Morton proposes. Of course,
the author is quick to announce that ambient poetics
wants to retain
"the flavor of the unknown, a mystifying
quality"
(96). Still, if the unknown becomes momentarily
known, we get to know what it will be like. Under those
circumstances, doesn't ambient poetics miss the genuine
unknown-ness, which is finally lost or, worse, tamed?
The question is
"how do you retain the
mystery?"
Morton espouses with enthusiasm Adorno's radical
concept of nonidentity, as it gives him the
opportunity to analyze what he means when he says that
humanity nowadays needs a dark ecology.
Nonidentity is the place where we become unafraid of
difference, where we supposedly simulate the dissolution
of foreground into background, of object into subject
and back, or of thing into environment and ambience.
Paradoxically, nonidentity also means to avoid resting
on the laurels of such a fusion/dissolution. Dark
ecology, then, borrows from the elusive nature of
nonidentity to investigate the non-solidity and
nonidentity of perception. How different is this ecology
from traditional environmental aesthetics? Whereas the
latter calls for an immersion into the beauty of the
natural object, thereby inevitably aestheticizing the
non-human and eventually keeping it at a distance
(while, in some strange way, reifying the human
as an extension of the non-human), dark ecology leaves
the object as it is. Practically, that would mean to
abstain from giving emphasis on what should be done in
order for the environment to be saved: Presenting nature
in the raw would suffice. In ambient art, that might
translate as
"presenting an object without a frame, or a
frame without an object"
(150); in music, focusing on
repetitive rhythm and forgetting about the melody; in
literature, writing endlessly without a target, thus
preserving the ambience of sheer textuality. Such
tendencies would be dark and melancholic insofar as they
allow also for the objecthood of ugliness and dirt. To
make waste disappear does not abide by the rules of dark
ecology since it would be identical to erasing the
margins for the sake of the center: one would have to
use waste rather than dispose of it.
Morton is right in arguing that an ecology liberated
from nature and its metaphysical connotations is an
ecology that has done away with didacticism. For
instance, he raises the question of whether Wordsworth
is really celebrating nature when he urges humans
(in
"The Tables Turned") to
"up, up, quit your books"
and experience nature as it is. It turns out it is not
such an ecological, let alone ecomimetic, advice, first
and foremost because it is actually an order:
"Go out
and adore nature!"
One probably
ends up hating it! It is
the other side of the same coin. Both sides are equally ecodidactic, therefore consumerist and profoundly
un-ecological. To be truly ecological (ecomimetic) and
ambient, one needs to vacillate between incorporating
the environment and "relaxing into an inorganic state of
becoming the environment"
(72). In Morton's view, ecomimesis should be anamorphic as well as oblique, like
the skull in Holbein's The Ambassadors. That
sounds ideal but how can we see it happen in
environmental representations or ecological thinking?
There are at least two dangers involved in Morton's
concept of the ambient rhetoric and poetics. First, if
nature writing fulfills its purpose of respecting nature
and the environment by endlessly disseminating itself as
pure textuality that extends well beyond the margins of
a page or the frame of a painting (Morton does provide
us with analogous literary cases to support this
argument), then how can it be simultaneously economical,
minimalistic, raw, exhibiting silence as silence,
in short, ambient? That looks like a dead end unless the
question is meant to remain open. Second, there
is a major problem when it comes to thinking seriously
about Morton's idea that nature should not be molded
into art any more (artwork being a so-called imitation
of life), but rather, art should dissolve back into
nature. The latter part dictates that representation
become presence again. In essence, that was what the
Romantics'
motto
"back to nature"
was all about. However
romantic that sounds, it is potentially hazardous as it
entails the possibility of terrorizing the human by
making, for instance, gothic art into gothic
reality. Does being ecological involve also being
under some threat?
Morton's poststructuralist (with a touch of
phenomenology) take on ecology keeps him, at times, from
acknowledging the presence in his work of more theorists
than he is willing to acknowledge. To discuss
theoretical allegiances, one might retort, would weaken
his arguments about the nonconceptuality of ecomimetic
thought―after all, it would be an oxymoron to speak of
nonconcept by using concept. Still, the
author is much more indebted to Lyotard, for instance,
than he cares to reveal, especially when it comes to
theorizing nuance as that realm that lies
in-between states and opposites. For him, Lyotard is
excessively optimistic in trying to trace nuance,
whereas Morton maintains that there is no such place
precisely because we cannot find it. He is also indebted
to Heidegger and the idea (taken from The Question
Concerning Technology) that nature has always
already been technologized before we knew it, once
"lawn"
was seen as
"garden,"
to put it simplistically.
He is also preoccupied with the Heideggerian notion of
enframing as a means of creating aesthetic
distance from the object―in our case, nonhuman
environment―and subsequently demystifying it. The irony
lies in the fact that we do need aesthetic distance to
let the world keep its mysteriousness intact―an
indispensable prerequisite for respecting ambience.
Morton openly admits that we cannot get too close to
wilderness, as it stops being one. Still, irony appears
to be integral to ambient and ecomimetic poetics and
aesthetics.
What
is great about Morton's analysis is the insightful way
in which he practices what he theorizes: nothing is
wasted in his argumentation, and although he keeps
coming back to the same terminologies and definitions
over and over again, he does it with brilliant style and
with the purpose of renewing (should we say "recycling"),
in the very process of his writing, his notion of
ecomimesis and ambient poetics. Ambient poetics must
mutate in order to survive.
On the other hand, this last statement risks placing too
heavy a burden on the environment.
emmanouil aretoulakis
university of crete
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