'A reckoning for our species': the
philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene
Timothy Morton wants humanity to give
up some of its core beliefs, from the fantasy that we can control the planet to
the notion that we are ‘above’ other beings. His ideas might sound weird, but
they’re catching on. By Alex Blasdel
A few years ago, Björk began corresponding with a
philosopher whose books she admired. “hi timothy,” her first message to him
began. “i wanted to write this letter for a long time.” She was trying to give
a name to her own singular genre, to label her work for posterity before the
critics did. She asked him to help define the nature of her art – “not only to
define it for me, but also for all my friends, and a generation actually.”
It turned out the philosopher, Timothy Morton, was a fan of
Björk. Her music, he told her, had been “a very deep influence on my way of
thinking and life in general”. The sense of eerie intimacy with other species,
the fusion of moods in her songs and videos – tenderness and horror, weirdness
and joy – “is the feeling of ecological awareness”, he said. Morton’s own work
is about the implications of this strange awareness – the knowledge of our
interdependence with other beings – which he believes undermines long-held
assumptions about the separation between humanity and nature. For him, this is
the defining characteristic of our times, and it is compelling us to change our
“core ideas of what it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is”.
Over the past decade, Morton’s ideas have been spilling into
the mainstream. Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of London’s
Serpentine gallery, and perhaps the most powerful figure in the contemporary
art world, is one of his loudest cheerleaders. Obrist told readers of Vogue
that Morton’s books are among the pre-eminent cultural works of our time, and
recommends them to many of his own collaborators. The acclaimed artist Olafur
Eliasson has been flying Morton around the world to speak at his major
exhibition openings. Excerpts from Morton’s correspondence with Björk were
published as part of her 2015 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York.
Morton’s terminology is “slowly infecting all the
humanities”, says his friend and fellow thinker Graham Harman. Though many
academics have a reputation for writing exclusively for their colleagues down
the hall, Morton’s peculiar conceptual vocabulary – “dark ecology”, “the
strange stranger”, “the mesh” – has been picked up by writers in a cornucopia
of fields, from literature and epistemology to legal theory and religion. Last
year, he was included in a much-discussed list of the 50 most influential
living philosophers. His ideas have also percolated into traditional media
outlets such as Newsweek, the New Yorker and the New York Times.
Part of what makes Morton popular are his attacks on settled
ways of thinking. His most frequently cited book, Ecology Without Nature, says
we need to scrap the whole concept of “nature”. He argues that a distinctive
feature of our world is the presence of ginormous things he calls
“hyperobjects” – such as global warming or the internet – that we tend to think
of as abstract ideas because we can’t get our heads around them, but that are
nevertheless as real as hammers. He believes all beings are interdependent, and
speculates that everything in the universe has a kind of consciousness, from
algae and boulders to knives and forks. He asserts that human beings are
cyborgs of a kind, since we are made up of all sorts of non-human components;
he likes to point out that the very stuff that supposedly makes us us – our DNA
– contains a significant amount of genetic material from viruses. He says that
we’re already ruled by a primitive artificial intelligence: industrial capitalism.
At the same time, he believes that there are some “weird experiential
chemicals” in consumerism that will help humanity prevent a full-blown
ecological crisis.
Morton’s theories might sound bizarre, but they are in tune
with the most earth-shaking idea to emerge in the 21st century: that we are
entering a new phase in the history of the planet – a phase that Morton and
many others now call the “Anthropocene”.
For the past 12,000 years, human beings lived in a
geological epoch called the Holocene, known for its relatively stable,
temperate climes. It was, you might say, the California of planetary history.
But it is coming to an end. Recently, we have begun to alter the Earth so
drastically that, according to many scientists, a new epoch is dawning. After
the briefest of geological vacations, we seem to be entering a more volatile
period.
The term Anthropocene, from the Ancient Greek word
anthropos, meaning “human”, acknowledges that humans are the major cause of the
earth’s current transformation. Extreme weather, submerged cities, acute
resource shortages, vanished species, lakes turned to deserts, nuclear fallout:
if there is still human life on earth tens of thousands of years from now,
societies that we can’t imagine will have to grapple with the changes we are
wreaking today. Morton has noted that 75% of the greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere at this very moment will still be there in half a millennium. That’s
15 generations away. It will take another 750 generations, or 25,000 years, for
most of the those gases to be absorbed into the oceans.
A dried-up reservoir in South Korea. Photograph: Yonhap/EPA
The Anthropocene is not only a period of manmade disruption.
It is also a moment of blinking self-awareness, in which the human species is
becoming conscious of itself as a planetary force. We’re not only driving
global warming and ecological destruction; we know that we are.
One of Morton’s most powerful insights is that we are
condemned to live with this awareness at all times. It’s there not only when
politicians gather to discuss international environmental agreements, but when
we do something as mundane as chat about the weather, pick up a plastic bag at
the supermarket or water the lawn. We live in a world with a moral calculus
that didn’t exist before. Now, doing just about anything is an environmental
question. That wasn’t true 60 years ago – or at least people weren’t aware that
it was true. Tragically, it is only by despoiling the planet that we have
realised just how much a part of it we are.
Morton believes that this constitutes a revolution in our
understanding of our place in the universe on a par with those fomented by
Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. He is just one of thousands of geologists,
climate scientists, historians, novelists and journalists writing about this
upheaval, but, perhaps better than anyone else, he captures in words the
uncanny feeling of being present at the birth of this extreme age.
“There you are, turning the ignition of your car,” he
writes. “And it creeps up on you.” Every time you fire up your engine you don’t
mean to harm the Earth, “let alone cause the Sixth Mass Extinction Event in the
four-and-a-half billion-year history of life on this planet”. But “harm to
Earth is precisely what is happening”. Part of what’s so uncomfortable about
this is that our individual acts may be statistically and morally
insignificant, but when you multiply them millions and billions of times – as
they are performed by an entire species – they are a collective act of
ecological destruction. Coral bleaching isn’t just occurring over yonder, on
the Great Barrier Reef; it’s happening wherever you switch on the air
conditioning. In short, Morton says, “everything is interconnected”.
As Morton’s work spreads beyond cultural hierophants such as
Björk to the pages of major news outlets, he is arguably becoming our most
popular guide to the new epoch. Yes, he has some seemingly crazy ideas about
what it’s like to be alive right now – but what it’s like to be alive right
now, in the Anthropocene, is pretty crazy.
In the course of its young life, the Anthropocene has grown
into a concept as grand in its scope as any other world-historical paradigm
worth its salt (which, if it’s sea salt, now includes a good dose of synthetic
waste in tiny particles called microplastics). What began as a technical debate
within the earth sciences has led, in Morton’s view, to a confrontation with
some of our most basic ways of understanding the world. In the Anthropocene, he
writes, we are undergoing “a traumatic loss of coordinates”.
The Anthropocene idea is generally attributed to the Nobel
prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the biologist Eugene
Stoermer, who started popularising the term in 2000. From the outset, many took
Crutzen and Stoermer’s concept seriously, even if they disagreed with it. Since
the late 20th century, scientists have viewed geological time as a drama
punctuated by great cataclysms, not merely a gradual accretion of incremental
changes, and it made sense to see humanity itself as the latest cataclysm.
Imagine geologists from a future civilisation examining the
layers of rock that are in the slow process of forming today, the way we
examine the rock strata that formed as the dinosaurs died off. That
civilisation will see evidence of our sudden (in geological terms) impact on
the planet – including fossilised plastics and layers both of carbon, from
burning carbon fuels, and of radioactive particles, from nuclear testing and
explosions – just as clearly as we see evidence of the dinosaurs’ rapid demise.
We can already observe these layers forming today.
For a couple of years, a lively debate over the usefulness
of the concept unfolded. Detractors argued that humanity’s “geological signal”
was not yet loud enough to justify the coronation of a new epoch, or that the
term had no scientific use. Supporters wondered when they should date the
Anthropocene’s start. To the advent of agriculture, many millennia ago? To the
invention of the steam engine in the 18th century and the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution? To 5.29am on 16 July 1945, the moment when the
first-ever nuclear test exploded over the New Mexico desert? (Morton, in his
all-embracing way, treats each of these moments as pivotal.) Then, in 2002,
Crutzen set out his arguments in the scientific journal Nature. The idea of a
moment in planetary history in which human influence was predominant seemed to
tie together so many disparate developments – from retreating glaciers to fresh
thinking about the limits of capitalism – that the term quickly spread to other
earth sciences, and then beyond.
Since then, at least three academic journals devoted to the
Anthropocene have been founded, several universities have established formal
research groups to ponder its implications, Stanford students have started a
popular podcast titled Generation Anthropocene, and thousands of articles and
books have been written on the subject, in fields ranging from economics to
poetry.
Some thinkers object to the term, arguing that it reinforces
the human-centric view of the world that has led us to the verge of ecological
catastrophe. Others say the blame for the despoliation of the Earth should be
laid at the feet not of humanity in general, but of (predominantly white,
western and male) capitalism. Several alternative designations have been
minted, including “Capitalocene”, but none has caught on. They don’t have the
disquieting existential ring of Anthropocene, which stresses both our
culpability and our fragility as humans.
Bleached coral on the Great Barrier Reef. Photograph:
Reuters
Around 2011, the Anthropocene “began to crop up regularly in
newspapers for the first time”, according to the scholar Jeremy Davies’s recent
history of the concept. The BBC, the Economist, National Geographic, Science
and others covered the idea. Planetary changes had increasingly led journalists
to set their environmental reporting in the context of geohistory – atmospheric
carbon dioxide levels of 400 parts per million? Not seen since the Pliocene,
three million years ago – and the Anthropocene became a useful shorthand for
placing human activity in the perspective of geological deep time. For Morton,
who had recently begun writing about it, it captured his concern with the way
beings of different kinds, including humans, depend on each other for their
existence – a fact the various calamities of the Anthropocene drove home.
In 2014, the Anthropocene was inducted into the Oxford
English Dictionary, and last year, the epoch was formally endorsed by a working
group within the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the official keeper
of geological time. As a tentative start date, they chose the year 1950, when
one of the clearest markers of human activity shows up globally in the earth’s
crust: plutonium isotopes from widespread nuclear testing. The working group’s
announcement was considered so significant that it made the front page of the
Guardian. (Across the media, the Anthropocene is now used to frame everything
from fiction reviews to discussions of the Donald Trump presidency.) As Jan
Zalasiewicz, the chair of the group and one of the leading scientists studying
the Anthropocene, said at the time, the new epoch “sets a different trajectory
for the Earth system” and we are only now “realising the scale and permanence
of the change”.
There have been periods of intense climate fluctuation
coupled with mass extinction before. The most recent was 66m years ago, when a
meteorite six miles in diameter struck what is now the Yucatán Peninsula. The
impact released an estimated 2m times the energy of the most powerful atomic
bomb ever detonated, altering the planet’s atmosphere and wiping out
three-quarters of its species. But that was a comparatively simple event, which
the physical sciences are well-equipped to understand.
To make sense of an epochal change that is being driven by
human activity, we need more than geology, meteorology and chemistry. If this
is a reckoning for our species, we need an intellectual guide – someone to tell
us just how panicked we should be, and how our recognition that we are
transforming the planet will change us in turn.
The awareness we’ve gained in the Anthropocene is not
generally a happy one. Many environmentalists now warn of impending global
catastrophe and urge industrial societies to change course. Morton stakes out a
more iconoclastic position. Instead of raising the ecological alarm like some
Paul Revere of the apocalypse, he advocates what he calls “dark ecology,” which
holds that the much-feared catastrophe has, in fact, already occurred.
Morton means not only that irreversible global warming is
under way, but also something more wide-reaching. “We Mesopotamians” – as he
calls the past 400 or so generations of humans living in agricultural and
industrial societies – thought that we were simply manipulating other entities
(by farming and engineering, and so on) in a vacuum, as if we were lab
technicians and they were in some kind of giant petri dish called “nature” or
“the environment”. In the Anthropocene, Morton says, we must wake up to the
fact that we never stood apart from or controlled the non-human things on the
planet, but have always been thoroughly bound up with them. We can’t even burn,
throw or flush things away without them coming back to us in some form, such as
harmful pollution. Our most cherished ideas about nature and the environment –
that they are separate from us, and relatively stable – have been destroyed.
Morton likens this realisation to detective stories in which
the hunter realises he is hunting himself (his favourite examples are Blade
Runner and Oedipus Rex). “Not all of us are prepared to feel sufficiently
creeped out” by this epiphany, he says. But there’s another twist: even though
humans have caused the Anthropocene, we cannot control it. “Oh, my God!” Morton
exclaimed to me in mock horror at one point. “My attempt to escape the web of
fate was the web of fate.”
The chief reason that we are waking up to our entanglement
with the world we have been destroying, Morton says, is our encounter with the
reality of hyperobjects – the term he coined to describe things such as
ecosystems and black holes, which are “massively distributed in time and space”
compared to individual humans. Hyperobjects might not seem to be objects in the
way that, say, billiard balls are, but they are equally real, and we are now
bumping up against them consciously for the first time. Global warming might
have first appeared to us as a bit of funny local weather, then as a series of
independent manifestations (an unusually torrential flood here, a deadly
heatwave there), but now we see it as a unified phenomenon, of which extreme
weather events and the disruption of the old seasons are only elements.
The Yueyaquan Crescent Lake in north-west China. Photograph:
Ed Jones/AFP/Getty
It is through hyperobjects that we initially confront the
Anthropocene, Morton argues. One of his most influential books, itself titled
Hyperobjects, examines the experience of being caught up in – indeed, being an
intimate part of – these entities, which are too big to wrap our heads around,
and far too big to control. We can experience hyperobjects such as climate in
their local manifestations, or through data produced by scientific
measurements, but their scale and the fact that we are trapped inside them
means that we can never fully know them. Because of such phenomena, we are
living in a time of quite literally unthinkable change.
This leads Morton to one of his most sweeping claims: that
the Anthropocene is forcing a revolution in human thought. Advances in science
are now underscoring how “enmeshed” we are with other beings – from the
microbes that account for roughly half the cells in our bodies, to our reliance
for survival on the Earth’s electromagnetic heat shield. At the same time,
hyperobjects, in their unwieldy enormity, alert us to the absolute boundaries
of science, and therefore the limits of human mastery. Science can only take us
so far. This means changing our relationship with the other entities in the
universe – whether animal, vegetable or mineral – from one of exploitation
through science to one of solidarity in ignorance. If we fail to do this, we
will continue to wreak havoc on the planet, threatening the ways of life we
hold dear, and even our very existence. In contrast to utopian fantasies that
we will be saved by the rise of artificial intelligence or some other new
technology, the Anthropocene teaches us that we can’t transcend our limitations
or our reliance on other beings. We can only live with them.
That might sound gloomy, but Morton glimpses in it a
liberation. If we give up the delusion of controlling everything around us, we
might refocus ourselves on the pleasure we take in other beings and life
itself. Enjoyment, Morton believes, might be the thing that turns us on to a
new kind of politics. “You think ecologically tuned life means being all
efficient and pure,” the tweet pinned to the top of his Twitter timeline reads.
“Wrong. It means you can have a disco in every room of your house.”
Those words are typical of his thought, which often sets out
from the dismal familiar, but then veers wildly off the beaten track. “There’s
something truly hopeful in his work,” Hans Ulrich Obrist says of Morton. “Hope
and maybe even optimism are somehow in there.” Morton has a story about
converting his home outside Houston, where he holds a chair at Rice University,
to wind-generated electricity. After a day or two of “feeling very righteous
and holy,” he realised he could now have “full-on strobes and decks and people
partaying for hours and hours, all day, every day,” while causing far less
damage to the planet. “And that’s the ecological future, actually.”
One Saturday morning last autumn, I went looking for Morton
at the Serpentine Galleries’ annual festival of ideas, where he was to speak
later that day. Over the previous few weeks, he had been in Seoul to help
Olafur Eliasson open a solo exhibition; in Singapore, to speak at the Future
Cities conference; in Brussels, to give a talk titled “Nature Isn’t Real” in a
public park at night (he said 250 people showed up); at the University of
Exeter, where he outlined “rocking”, his new theory of action, which he
described as “a queering of the theistic categories of active versus passive”;
in Rome, where he spent his time, among other things, drinking martinis; and in
Paris, where he went raving with his friend Ingrid and was so overcome with
emotion and exhaustion that he spent some of the night lying in the middle of
the dancefloor.
If you had to select an avatar for the Anthropocene, Morton
might be an appropriate choice. He has arctic-blue eyes that at once shock and
appear shocked. Combined with a slight pudginess that suggests physical
vulnerability, an eczematic redness to his face, and a thistle of thin blond
hair, he looks as if he has survived some kind of fallout. Indeed, he is
something of a man afflicted. Among other things, he suffers from severe sleep
apnoea, severe depression, severe migraines, and, it seemed to me over the
course of our conversations, the occasional bout of mild paranoia. Obrist, who
has recorded more than 2,500 hours of interviews with artists and philosophers,
told me that Morton is the only one who became “so emotional that actually he
starts to cry”. (They had been discussing mass extinction.)
Earlier in the year, when I had spoken to Morton on video
calls, he had been ebullient. Now, sitting at the back of the gallery’s
restaurant, which had been converted into a performance hall, he seemed to be
running on fumes. He had already published 14 essays that year, while
continuing work on his two upcoming books. In the next few weeks, he was
speaking in Chicago, at Yale, in Seoul (again), Munich and, finally, convening
with members of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to contemplate the kinds of
messages we should be sending into space on a potential reboot of the Voyager
mission. (The original, launched in 1977, sent two spacecraft hurtling beyond
our solar system; each contained a 12-inch gold-plated record engraved with
sounds and images representing humanity and other earthly beings.) By the end
of 2016, as he later wrote on his blog, Morton had racked up 350,000 air miles.
Morton’s itinerary was an index of how popular the notion of
the Anthropocene has become, and how deeply his approach to it resonates with
our increasingly disquieting experience of the world. Poring over his books, or
speaking to him in person, one starts to suspect that what is outlandish in his
thinking and personality actually reflects something truly strange about the
world. Over lunch, Morton ordered a chicken salad sandwich – an earlier
experiment with veganism had lapsed – and we discussed the development of his
thought. As he ate, I was reminded of a recent report that almost 60bn chickens
are slaughtered globally every year, which, in the words of Jan Zalasiewicz,
means that their carcasses have now been “fossilised in thousands of landfill
sites and on street corners around the world”. That thought leads immediately
to another one: about the bacterial “superbugs” we have created through
widespread use of antibiotics, especially in industrial livestock production.
From there, it’s only a short jump to thinking about other strange phenomena in
our new epoch, like rocks formed from plastic and seashells, and changes in the
earth’s rotation caused by melting ice sheets. Once you start listing these
unsettling Anthropocene facts, there’s no end to it.
It’s possible, when one encounters Morton for the first or
second time, to wonder if there’s something concocted about his hippie
disposition, his emotionality, his intellectual flair. But his childhood
friends and relatives say that his visceral engagement with ecology, and his
academic prowess, go back to his childhood. Morton was born in north-west
London, in 1968, in the midst of a period when a growing awareness of
ecological threat still went hand in hand with the sense that people could
change the world for the better, possibly under the influence of LSD. After his
parents, who were both concert violinists, divorced in the late 1970s, his
father sailed off on a Greenpeace protest trawler; his mother was a committed
feminist who was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
From early on, Morton was an academic standout. He received
the top scholarship at the elite St Paul’s School in London five years in a
row, and then went to Oxford to read English. He got the highest marks in his
subject across the university in his first-year exams, and a first in his
finals. Doing well academically was important to Morton, but eventually he came
to the realisation that it’s “actually secondary to this other thing, called
being alive”. His life took on something of the shape his work would later
adopt. It was about more than accumulating knowledge; it was also about
pursuing pleasure and intimacy. In his second year as an undergraduate, he and
his roommate, Mark Payne, who is now a classicist at the University of Chicago,
would “do acid and listen to Butthole Surfers and talk about Blake”. (Payne
says they did acid and talked about Milton.) He also fell in love for the first
time. As a graduate student, Morton wore his hair long, with a suede jacket,
and decked himself out in beads. His PhD thesis, which is recognised as an
important contribution to the study of Romanticism, showed that the
vegetarianism of Percy and Mary Shelley was intimately entwined with their
politics and art. Paul Hamilton, who supervised some of Morton’s graduate work,
told me that, when it came to the Shelleys, Morton “changed the lights for
everyone”.
Despite the success of his dissertation, Morton struggled to
land an academic position, and even contemplated killing himself. Eventually,
he found a job at the University of Colorado, Boulder, before moving on, in
2003, to the University of California in Davis, north-east of San Francisco.
Being in northern California seemed to season his thought, and he began
focusing on explicitly ecological questions, such as what we write about when
we write about nature. In a canny bit of self-branding, he also took to calling
himself Professor of Literature and Environment.
Over the next few years, Morton published his book
challenging the idea of “nature”, as well as a follow-up asking what it means
for us to rely in unfathomably complex ways on a countless number of other
beings. He also joined a small, contentious philosophical movement called
object-oriented ontology, or OOO, which holds that every being, including
humans, can only ever grasp the world in its own limited ways. (In other words,
we will never know what flies know, and vice versa.) Then, in 2012, Morton left
California for his current chair at Rice, one of the most well-regarded
universities in America.
With the security of tenure and the successive infusions of
Buddhism and OOO into his thinking, Morton started to write in a more riffing,
personal style. His talk of discos in his wind-powered home and the cringey way
he elongates “partaying” aren’t incidental to his project. “Inevitably,
ecological awareness has this kind of 70s flavour to it,” he says. It’s an aesthetic
he embraces, “in all of its flared weirdness”. There’s a bell-bottomed
capaciousness to his intellectual style, too. He may well be the only person
ever to grace a list of the most influential living philosophers and have a
songwriting credit on an album that reached No 4 in the UK charts (Stacked Up
by Senser, from 1994).
He has followed in the footsteps of thinkers such as Jacques
Derrida and Edward Said in giving the prestigious Wellek Lecture, at the
University of California in Irvine – but he has also performed at Glastonbury,
playing music for fire-juggling performance artists, and served as a consultant
on the Steve Coogan series The Trip to Italy. Although he’s about to publish a
book attempting to fuse dark ecology with Marxism (“The tweak is pretty
intense, and not everyone’s going to like it,” he says), he also has one
forthcoming for Pelican books, Being Ecological, which is meant to enchant the
general public. The first sentence is: “This book contains no ecological facts
whatsoever.” Though several of his books are dedicated to the customary people
(spouse, children, siblings), he has also dedicated one to his cat, the late
Allan Whiskersworth. One of the most engrossing posts on his blog, which he
updates regularly, is a critical inquiry into giant penises drawn on rooftops
so they can be discovered via Google Earth. He’s deep into Shambhala Buddhism
and has circumambulated Mount Kailash in Tibet. Not long ago, he received a
very moving Tarot reading.
If people find most of this ridiculous, all the better. “I
like to think of myself as the corniest, most awful thing you could possibly
imagine,” he told me. He has achieved the usual trappings of academic success;
now that he’s through the metaphorical metal detectors of polite society, he has
a different aim. “I can get quite well known, and then I can unleash this kind
of anarchist-hippie thing that I’ve been holding like a very precious liquid,
carefully, without spilling any, for years and years and years,” he said. “And
now I’m going to pour it everywhere.”
When it was time for his talk at the Serpentine, Morton
appeared in a tight-fitting, silver Versace shirt of the sort a camp Bond
villain might wear. His lecture was titled “Stuff Can Happen”.
“You wouldn’t believe how many philosophers are afraid of
movement,” he began. He went on to discuss two strands of thought in the work
of the philosopher Hegel. One problem with Hegel, Morton said, “the problem I
call macro-Hegel, is that macro-Hegel makes the slinky move up the stairs,
improbably. And at the top of the stairs, like the killer in Psycho, is
waiting, drum roll, you guessed it, white western patriarchy in the guise of
the Prussian state.” (I had not guessed this; should I have?) “So macro-Hegel
blows it.”
It seemed an odd way to approach a lecture to a motley crew
of artists, activists, students and musicians. Even as someone with an interest
in Morton’s work, I soon felt bored and distracted. The man standing next to
me, an American scholar with an acerbic sense of humour, rolled his eyes and
whispered a comment to the effect of “What is this bullshit?”
Despite Morton’s popularity, this isn’t an uncommon response
to his work. The Morton detractors with whom I spoke accused him of misunderstanding
contemporary science, like quantum mechanics and set theory, and then claiming
his distortions as support for his wild ideas. They shared a broad critique
that reminded me of the sceptical adage, “If you open your mind too far, your
brains will fall out.” The slurry of interesting ideas in Morton’s work doesn’t
hold together under scrutiny, they say. The philosopher Ray Brassier, who was
once associated with OOO, has charged Morton and his blogging confrères with
generating “an online orgy of stupidity”.
Other critics, especially on the left, complain that
Morton’s conception of the Anthropocene glosses over issues of race, class,
gender and colonialism by blaming the entire species for the damage inflicted
by a privileged minority. The focus on the human enshrined in the term
Anthropocene is a particular target for critics. By referring to humans as a
unified whole, they argue that Morton effaces distinctions between the affluent
west and the other members of humanity, many of whom were living in a state of
ecological catastrophe long before the notion of the Anthropocene became trendy
on campuses in Europe and North America. Others say that Morton’s notion of
politics is too woolly, or that the last thing we need when facing ecological
challenges are abstract musings about the nature of objects.
Morton’s defenders, however, see him as something of a Ralph
Waldo Emerson for the Anthropocene: his writing has value, even if it doesn’t
always stand up to philosophical scrutiny. “No one in a philosophy department
is going to be taking Tim Morton seriously,” Claire Colebrook, a professor of
English at Pennsylvania State University who has worked extensively on the
Anthropocene, told me. But she teaches Morton’s work to undergraduates and they
love it. “Why? Because they’re like, ‘Shut up and give me an idea!’”
Not everything that Morton said to me in the course of our
conversations struck me as philosophically or ecologically plausible. (“You and
me, and our computers and that painting behind you and maybe one of the pigeons
in the street – we’re going to get together and make a little anarchist
collective, and the focus of this anarchist collective will be reading, um, the
letters of Beethoven.”) But what attracts many to his ideas are not their
cogency so much as their profusion and playfulness. Hans Ulrich Obrist and the
artists Philippe Parreno and Olafur Eliasson all used the same word to describe
his oeuvre: it’s a “toolbox”, they said, from which they can pluck useful
ideas.
That toolbox may be useful to the rest of us, too. As global
warming and other features of the Anthropocene intensify, our experience of
this grave new age is bound to become ever weirder and more fraught. When that
happens, more and more people are likely to seek out writings – such as
Morton’s – that echo their experiences of alienation, as well as their yearning
for hope. Some other thinkers seem to believe we can tidy up the world if we
just have better, more logical, more rigorous ideas. Morton says we can tidy up
our ideas all we want, but the world is going to remain a fundamentally messy
place that will always resist our philosophical decluttering. What we need to
do instead is get comfortable with this weirdness. During one of our earliest
conversations, I told Morton I appreciated his work, to the extent I thought I
understood it. “I think I understand it too, sometimes,” he replied.
There’s nothing like the prospect of an authoritarian
strongman to make intellectuals, hippies, and, above all, hippie intellectuals
appear hopelessly ineffectual. Compared to organising protests or setting up a
recurring donation to the American Civil Liberties Union, talk of deep time or
of effacing the false ontological divide between humanity and nature risks
seeming rather fatuous.
In November, the week after the election of Donald Trump,
Morton flew to New York to confab with the Nasa group about what a new Golden
Record might contain. He was devastated by Trump’s victory, but not necessarily
surprised that America had opted for what he called the political equivalent of
a diet of vicodin and cinnamon buns. In his hotel room, he had a “private
weeping session” while reading the David Malouf novel Fly Away Peter. Later, he
went for a bite of sushi – in which mercury from coal-fired power plants,
smelting metals and burning trash tends to accumulate, occasionally leading to
poisoning – and got swept up in a large crowd. “I was in that first protest,
man,” he told me. “I was in that first fucking anti-Trump protest at Trump
Tower.” He quipped to his Twitter followers, and to the Nasa meeting, that he
wanted to put the president-elect on the next Voyager probe.
I wondered how potent Morton’s animistic politics would seem
under the new dispensation. The day after his talk at the Serpentine in the
autumn, I had eaten lunch with him, the performance artist Kathelin Gray and
John Polk Allen, AKA Johnny Dolphin, the prime mover behind Biosphere 2, a
planetary microcosm built inside what is essentially a gigantic test tube in
the Arizona desert. The conversation, in the course of meandering from places
on the globe with special energy (the Himalayas, Chaco Canyon) to the “lunatic
asylum for clever people” that is Oxford, turned toward solidarity with other
species.
The Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico.
Photograph: Richard Susanto/Getty Images/Flickr RF
“I’ve always called other things ‘people’,” Gray said. “My
Native American friends are very happy about that.”
“How could you not call them people?” Morton responded.
Gray told a story of snakes she had known. Morton, evidently
moved, put his hand on his chest. “You had two friends called Snakey?” he said.
“That’s wonderful.”
This had all sounded a bit ludicrous, even before Trump got
elected. But somewhere in these schmaltzy attempts to express their affinity
with other creatures was a genuine desire to move towards the sort of radically
pluralist politics that Morton advocates. “Don’t hide under a rock, for
heaven’s sake,” Morton had said to me at one point. “Go out in the street and
start making any and as many kinds of political affiliations with as many kinds
of beings, human or otherwise, that you possibly can, with a view to creating a
more non-violent and just, for everybody, ecological world.” It was hard to argue
with those aims. We can’t debate with other species, but the Anthropocene makes
it clear that we need to include their wellbeing among our goals.
Morton’s own political emphasis seemed to change after the
election. Wind-powered house parties and interspecies reading groups were out.
Now, the whole point, he said, was “to freakin’ crush these fascists over and
over and over again”.
Still, the Anthropocene isn’t going away just because a
venal troll in a baggy suit is sitting in the White House. The build-up of
carbon in the air and nitrogen in the soil; the acidification of the oceans and
the desertification of once-fertile lands; the counterpane of radioactive
isotopes (from nuclear testing) and plastic (from consumer packaging) that
blankets the globe; the species after species extinguished – the list of
dramatic changes to the planet goes on. The politics of today may be more
urgent than ever, but the need for a politics of tomorrow hasn’t gone away.
A few days after the election, Morton regained his sense of
humour and began to laugh about the president-elect, “this little orange guy
with a huge, yellow pile of Cheetos on his head”. Yes, Morton was going to
spend the next months, or however long it took, fighting fascists on campus and
wherever else he could be heard, but he was also continuing to proclaim his
unusual view of ecology.
“Let’s put some house music on,” Morton said at the end of
one of our longest conversations. “Even if it’s true that we really are
screwed, let’s not spend the rest of our lives on this planet telling ourselves
how screwed we are.”
What should we do instead?
“Shake hands with a hedgehog and disco.”
Main photograph by Max Burkhalter for the Guardian
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário