Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics by Timothy Morton

Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics Reviews

• 
  Tano

  EWN reads like a flirty confrontation between Zizek and Derrida, self-aware and ironic in its over-intellectualized pop-culture references and playfully useless in its deconstructive inversions. This isn't a text on the reimagination of ecology against the concept of nature, it's a text on how we might index and reveal the semiotic paradoxes of the history of nature-writing and its nature of writing. I expected more. It's great contemporary literary criticism, but it isn't ecology or ecosophy or even really eco-criticism, the title Morton applies to his own work. It's just plain old criticism, whose object-shift from text to nature is really just an illusion concealing the movement of nature from outside to back inside the text itself. We give him this shift and we're left with the bad kind of poststructuralism.
• 
  Bettie

  
  'A reckoning for our species': the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene
  
  

  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.”
• 
  Daniel Petersen

  Yes, it did actually take me a few years to read this book front to back. I kept putting it down, reading tons of individual articles by Morton, reading books by some of his cohorts like Graham Harman and Ian Bogost (both of whom couldn't be more opposite in style - so chummy and crisp and comparatively crystal clear). A dedicated and determined reader could get this book done in a week, but I suspect it would be challenging for anyone. The book meanders, to say the least. Morton has central points and tenets and there is a structure here, but all of that can be hard to discern. He claims in a later book that in the 21st century 'thinking is about to spill over the edge'. That's exciting in a way. But we're never going to be ready for such intellectual spillage. It's always going to be difficult at first. Morton's prose style and analysis seems to be trying to track with this new way of thinking that he calls 'the ecological thought'. It rhizomes to say the least. His arguments are like fractal root or branch systems, though sometimes even more like the effervescence of waves or shimmering of auroral lights. It takes some getting used to. It's pretty great at the article level. And even in this book it's exciting for paragraphs at a time, but I found myself constantly having to refer back to section headings and introductory remarks to remember just where I was at in his analysis. Even now. The book is closed, somewhat digested, and I'm still at something of a loss to sum it up or outline major points. That would require going yet again to the text and wrestling out something clearer than what's in the actual prose.
  
  All that said, there are tons of individual ideas and remarks in here that are thought-provoking and exciting when it comes to thinking about ecology in richer, better ways. I look forward to following up with The Ecological Thought (2010) and Dark Ecology (2016). The former I've already read the introductory chapter to and it's a thousand times clearer and more organised than this book.
  
  Impressions of what this book is about: we need to rethink our artistic engagement with the environment. Morton argues that we suffer from thinking of a monolithic transcendent being called 'Nature' when in fact something less containable and accessible is the reality. Thus, instead of merely mirroring our nonhuman surrounding with a deceptively immediate 'as I write this' sort of approach, we need to dig deeper with our words, our images, our poetics and discover that the fellow members of our ecology are 'strange strangers' (one of Morton's best phrases). Environmental writing needs to get weirder and embrace the poetically obscure and strange when describing the environment and our relationship to it. We've been 'tripping' for too long on a hippy version of interconnectivity and we need to get more punk and goth about it, embracing the dirtier, toxic elements of ecology, and seeing that even the 'prettier' stuff is utterly strange, an invitation to really try to get to know the ecological Other, and understanding that we'll never completely know it (here I might be straying slightly into Harman's thought and what Morton draws from it in later publications). Poetics of 'ambience' have misled us to some degree and we need to rethink and rewrite ambience in a way that includes the sorrow and melancholy of our wounded world. In one memorable passage, Morton likens the sound of existence to the tortured, melancholy, inhuman cry of the gruesome, shape-shifting extraterrestrial in John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing. That's the kind of poetics we need, rather than 'beautiful soul' approaches (a term I believe he draws from Hegel).
  
  Now I find all this emphasis on darker poetics quite welcome and invigorating. But I am left with questions about the evident joy or exuberance we may also see and hear in the strangeness of this planet's ecology and whether Morton's 'dark ecology' can accommodate that as well. I believe he addresses some of these kinds of questions in later works, so we'll see. There's much more to outline and engage with, but that will take a different kind of review. I think Morton is a very important thinker for our times. But I kind of doubt most people need to read this book. I believe he sums up and tightens what he says here in later works. For an introduction to his thought, I'd recommend the article "Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology" and the introductory chapter to his book The Ecological Thought.
• 
  Heather

  There are some gem-like thoughts that are provocative on their own, but I wish he'd just written it as a series of aphorisms.
• 
  Yanick Punter

  I expect a writer to make his ideas readable. This book failed that.
  (I still do find some of his ideas and the aura of "dark ecology" nice)
• 
  Branebrane

  Still baffled by the fact that this is considered one of the major works in the field of ecocriticism.
• 
  Tija Bija

  So I had to read this twice to get out of it the most, and will probably read it third time some years later for the missed “AHA” moments. At first it’s not so easy to adapt with Mortons writing style, because it’s beautifully layered with metaphors and philosophical and historical insights and also gives examples from art=/mostly literature scene. His ideas also stand on - giving the meaning through metaphors. And that is also the best way to explain experience of ungraspable nature, because nature is not just only that what our perceptions give to us, in most ways perceptions can lie, meaning we must acknowledge that our way of thinking is cookie cut by culture, language, etc. therefore we shouldn’t be so confident on “knowing” what nature is. The standard view is - nature is that all green stuff out there, right? and we must protect it, right? Protect from humans? protect from that, what is not in the nature category, right? .... humans versus nature, right?
  
  Not many ask themselves the question of “what is nature” actually? Well the school teaches us this very well, right? This book really made me remember myself learning in kindergarten and school from books with those pretty images, illustrations and poems, catchy songs of nature, and nowthis book gives me a little mind-stroke experience of how we are possibly brainwashed without bad intentions at all. But still the naïve look on nature is that what alienate humans from actual nature and all that ugly stuff...that is nature too. So yeah, for many first time readers it may be hard to grasp s u c h ideas that are (plus) not given in direct sense, instead through Mortons word plays. Yet it's still more readable than Haraway!
  
  If you use all your brain power in this work you can end up just like me, feeling helpless in my simulated mind that can at least now try to acknowledge in how romanticized way I am “programmed” to look at nature + speak about nature. So how to unlearn such possibly spoiled perception? Could I ever deeply (spiritually) feel the nature, that is not "nature" as a word? … As always after reading contemporary philosophies, I am left with just - "ok, now I know. ... now what?" - how can theory be brought in practice? Is it the role (and responsibility) of art, culture overall, to change our perception of nature? ...because "Ecology Without Nature" argues that is what brought us to here in the first place.
  
  I really am fascinated by such authors as Timoty M., who can (yet with their culture cultivated brain) come up with such reality/thought provoking ideas on nature, that wish to deconstruct our modern society constructed nature without even going in a radically nihilistic path or getting lost in semiotic obstacles. The book is double fascination because it is not just an ecocriticism, it is ecocriticism on ecocriticism. And the new ecocritique for ecocritiques is called “dark ecology”. It's basically saying that - (true) ecology must be without nature. Without the conceptualized word “nature”. (~not spoiling further~) So yea, not so easy applicable in culture realm that blindfolds society to live in just a tiny image of nature and wants to categorize everything and have straightforward meaning of words for everything... and unfortunately I am one of them, living in the image.
  
  If you are true fan of Romantic poetry, wilderness narrative and nature writing, nature lover, and so on, this might seem bitter and pretentious, and not relaxing at all.
• 
  Zach Irvin

  I’m a fan of Timothy Morton. This is the second book of his I’ve read, the first being Hyperobjects. In this book he follows a similar method of presentation to his other works; he selects a set of terms, defines them, then focuses on a few and draws out their implications and interactions.
  
  In this book, Morton argues that the way that we write about and talk about nature, rooted in Romantic notions of consumerism and capitalism, harms our attempts at ecological conservation. Thinking about nature as something “over there” separates us from the fundamental truth that there is not really an “over there” and that everything in the world is intimately connected. Even the “tree huggers” have issues. By focusing on Nature, these people forget the fact that humans and all the things we create are also a part of the ecology of the world. Morton tried to make this connection explicit through his idea of Dark Ecology. Morton makes the argument that we need to identify with the underside of ecology. The waste, the gross, sticky, dangerous parts of our involvement with the world. He argues that we need to choose to stand with and protect this world even though humans have poisoned it, and even though the responsibility cannot ultimately be traced back to any one particular person. To think in a truly ecological way, we can’t disown the clouds of radiation we have released, or the tremendous amount of carbon we have spilled into the atmosphere. We have to come to terms with those things and choose ecology anyway.
• 
  sdw

  Abstract. Intellectual. Philosophical.
  
  "the idea of nature is getting in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art" (1).
  
  Chapter one examines art - the limitations of language for representing the environment - a balancing act between there is only language and there is always reality.
  
  Chapter two provides a form of history - rather the rise of the idea of the world (or surrounding environment) in post romanticist writing.
  
  Chapter three is about future potentials, "Ecocritique could establish collective forms of identity that included other species and their worlds, real and possible. It would subvert fixating images of 'world' that inhibit humans from grasping their place in an already historical nature"(142).
  
  "the idea of place is not single, independent and solid. This leads to developing a new way of doing ecological criticism, which I call dark ecology. Dark ecology acknowledges that there is no way out of the paradoxes outlines in this book. Far from remaining natural, ecocriticism must admit that it is contingent and queer. I conclude by asserting that ecocritique, far from being hostile to deep ecology, is a form of 'really deep ecology.'"
  
  
  
  Confession: I felt lost in a labyrinth while reading this book.
  
  
• 
  Thomas Fackler

  After a lot of paradoxical sentence-making Ecology Without Nature ended up being about the fact that nature is not something separate from existence. The pursuit of aestheticization of nature, that something out there to which we must escape or return, invalidates much of our struggle to communally bring ourselves under control and consciously develop a program of living within our means - that with which earth enriches us both to our benefit and to our peril.
• 
  Bennett

  sprawling but brilliant - one of the very few books on ecology and ctulure that I've read that isn't completely missing the point. Full of convincing philosophical perspectives on the roots of the major ecological and human crises, as articulated in mostly literature, but other cultural forms too.
• 
  Cathie

  
  http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.miamio...
• 
  Laura Walin

  In general, I don't like books which are written in such a cumbersome way that the argument is (next to) impossible to follow. 'Ecology without nature' is not an exception. I think (after one reading I cannot be sure yet) that Morton tries to say that as long as we (the humans) keep our distance from the nature and define it as separate from us, and at the same time as an object, we cannot really deal with the problems that we have caused to it. This idea I find appealing, but the style of Morton was unfrotunately very unappeling. Instead of showing the reader clearly the paths of his argument step by step, he talks in half sentences, insinuations, gives hints, and assumes a lot (a lot!) of background knowledge to the extent that it is not at all clear on what he bases his statements on. I may change my opinion about this book after a second reading, but I do prefer studies where the argument is so lucidly presented that I can get it in one go.
• 
  Alper Çuğun

  elcphrasis, ecopoetics, Ecorhapsody, ecomimesis, Ecodidacticism, Ecopsychology
  
  The words above should give you an idea of why reading this short little book took as long as it did. Morton's message along the lines that the idea of ‘nature’ is treacherous and mostly useless when we are dealing with modern ecology is valuable but could more succinctly and clearly be written in a quarter of the pages.
  
  Also he keeps referring to any and every philosopher out there but quite regularly to Hegel and that is where I just zone out. Books should have a Hegel warning on them so the more practical thinkers among us know to give them a wide berth.
  
  I think some other book of Morton may be a better entry point and frankly use of your time than this one is.
• 
  Curtis Anthony Bozif

  Before Morton got into the OOO stuff. The first of three chapters was the most useful and interesting to me as an artist interested in how we think about and what we mean when we talk about nature and landscape.
• 
  Anne

  Really interesting provocative trio of chapters [sort of but not entirely feeling like a BOOK] that pairs well with Karatani Kōjin's writing/s on landscape and the rise of national aesthetics and subjectivity. The last third (Ch 3) gets a little inward-looking in its new and slightly halting anthemics--lots of name checking, not as much mulching through argument as I would like. (note: you're not ALLOWED to merely name-check The Big Lebowski when you make it turgid, e.g. ""since shamanism, to alter only slightly the immortal words of the Coen Brothers' film The Big Lebowski, treats objects like people." What?!? And similar throwaway lines about Apache and other "alt" ecologies are kind of goofball.) Enjoyed his focus on radicalising formalism & his thorough knowledge of Romanticism and Wordsworth, the consistency that lent to his examination of post-Romantic poetics via short-form forms like the poem (as opposed to novels). Wonder how particular kinds of phenomenology (which he embraces in an iffy way) may be differently available in modes that privilege things like allegory, more of a first-person plow through time, as opposed to lingering (pace Wordsworth) in its spots. I didn't 'get' his critique of noise music (who, precisely?) or Deleuze/Guattari--seemed a flatfooted and willfully literal reading of 'machines,' which surprised me. Maybe a symptom of the riff on cybernetics in general, which I found under-informed.
• 
  Luke

  I like some of his other works better in terms of relatability and conceptualization. I had to set this one down a few times. I am a huge fan. Dark ecology is a great one. This book is more robust and intimate to its own strengths and weaknesses.
  
  To Morton, the self-deprecating NON!-post-modernist, (AKA post-modernist), we still live in the romantic era, and that can be something to cherish when it feels like art is dead. He’s taking on a monumental task to consider the way we think about the environment as a whole.
  
  He does this in an almost conversational way despite it being a metaphysical endeavor. He does draw on Hegel philosophically but also pulls from a variety of writers about nature. His main point is well taken. There are truths in the authenticity of what nature has done to us! Our lack of focus, our trashed experiences.
  
  We’re only going to miss the point if we cut out all the garbage and materialism that rules our lives. This is the main environment we live in now. Being genuinely curious about our present environment, materialist or otherwise, is going to provide the means of change.
  
  Setting out unrealistic rallying calls into the void which ignore our own daily footprints is just digging a bigger hole.
• 
  Candy Wood

  While I'm not sure Morton's approach to ecological criticism is as new as he thinks it is, it does provide much to think about. In his view, focus on poetic descriptions of nature creates an aestheticizing distance that diverts readers and critics from environmental problems. That means true ecology requires more ironic reading, and acceptance of the nonhuman as what it is rather than trying to remake it in our own image. For him, deconstruction is a powerful tool for doing this, and he clearly acknowledges his debt to writers like Derrida and Adorno. Through examples from what he defines as both high and low art, he makes the theory work. I was beginning to get annoyed with what seemed to be a dismissive use of "kitsch," applied to Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and the films based on the books, but a ten-page deconstruction of the term made clearer what he was doing. Close readings of a few key texts, especially Edward Thomas's poem "Adlestrop," Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and poems by Wordsworth, Blake, and Clare, also help establish his view of "dark ecology."
• 
  Jason

  Morton's theory of "beautiful soul syndrome" and his readings of ecological literature encourage us to embrace melancholy so that we can accept responsibility without regard to fault.
  
  I applied dark ecology to my reading of
  Trouble on Triton by Sam Delany to elucidate the six elements of ambient poetics (rendering,tone, medial, aeolian, timbral, and the re-mark) essential to ecomimesis. Morton uses the word ecomimesis to describe nature writing, implying mimicry and Plato’s idea of the poet’s divine madness. Ecomimesis evokes a pervasive quietness (like a hush) that authenticates an atmosphere. The result of ecomimesis is a shared ambience called “nature”.
  
  Instead of exclusive categories, these are intentionally vague and overlapping. As I went about identifying exemplars of these elements from Trouble on Triton, the ambivalence between categories revealed varying layers of significance and emphasized the foregrounding-backgrounding function.
  
  
  www.jasonfmcdaniel.com
• 
  Jonathan

  I love the tongue in cheek tone that this book is written. Morton does a great job laying out his theoretical framework in "Queer Ecology." It's insightful and funny and he effortlessly keeps his reader interested. But then in "Ecology Without Nature" he loses me. I believe he is separating the two from each other and showing his readers that nature is a thing that can function on its own. Or maybe it's many things coming together to carry out their functions. Maybe Žižek is somewhere in there looking for Nature and can't seem to find it. I don't know. It's interesting to read and you'll learn some new vocabulary words along the way (kitsch!), but I still can't tell you what his argument is.
• 
  Cliff

  A really enjoyable read. Challenging, thought provoking -- both world changing and world destroying. If you're serious about thinking about ecology, you'll need to work your way through the thoughts that Tim Morton is laying out here. I highly recommend reading Morton's blog, listening to MP3s of his lectures and watching his YouTube presentations in concert with reading the book. It's live thought and it's happening now.
  
  The tie ins to Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology aren't visible in the text of the book, but the links are there and shed light on the thought.
  
  Morton's next book, 'The Ecological Thought' is on my wish list.
• 
  Stuart Cooke

  It reads like a second or third draft, and Morton has problems with logically coherent writing (he often gets distracted by an idea mid-paragraph and loses track of his argument, or he doesn't seem interested in how one sentence might/might not follow on from the one before it). His dismissal of Deleuze & Guattari is also rather provincial and poorly argued. Nevertheless, there's plenty of real value here, and the text deserves to be central to ecocritical studies in coming years.
• 
  Jennifer Scappettone

  Trash the concept of "nature" outright.
• 
  Jared

  Rigorous.
• 
  Mills College Library

  820.936 M8917 2007