`Author` [[Timothy Morton]] `Availability` Yes > [!info] ![[All Art is Ecoligical.image.jpeg]] > https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/443663/all-art-is-ecological-by-morton-timothy/9780141997001 ## Key takeaways - [[Hyperobjects]]: Philosophy and [[Ecology]] after the End of the World. Hyperobjects are things so complex and beyond our understanding that we can’t really comprehend them easily - Art helps us access that which, like hyperobjects, are otherwise beyond our comprehention - We are in a bardo state which his theory of [[Dark Ecology]] speaks to. ## Quotes > And for the longest time these logistics were called Nature. Nature is just agricultural logistics in slow motion, the nice-seeming build up to the Anthropocene, the gentle slope of the upwardly moving rollercoaster that you don't even suspect to be a rollercoaster. > Why this constant and very particular orientation to the future - what needs 'to be done' in order to start being ecological? It's a sort of gravity well that ecological thought about [[ethics]] and politics can get stuck in. You think future and you think radically different from the present. You think I need to change my mindset, now, then I can really start making a difference. > You are thinking along the lines of agricultural [[Religion]], which is designed mostly to keep agricultural hierarchies in place. You are trying to get the right attitude towards some transcendent principle; in other words, you are operating within the [[Language]] of good and evil, guilt and redemption. Agricultural religion (Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and so on) is implicitly [[hierarchical]]: there's a top tier and a bottom one, and the very word hierarchy means the rule of the priests. By framing ecological action this way, you have been sucked into a gravity well, and it's not an especially ecological space down there. In many ways, it's not helping at all. > There is an additional issue. We observe some [[Emotions]] in nonhumans such as elephants, but we are less willing to let elephants feel emotions that seem less 'useful' to us. We can let elephants be hungry when they look hungry, but we have trouble allowing that they are happy when they look happy. > That, for some reason, would be anthropomorphic, and many environmentalist thinkers are concerned not to be, although I've argued that it's impossible, since even if you intend not to be, there you are, a human, relating in whatever human way you are relating to whatever other lifeform. It's interesting that we think that sheer survival (hence hunger) is more 'real' than some kind of quality of existing (such as being happy). It says a lot about us that just surviving, being hungry, are supposedly 'real', aka nothing to do with being human in particular - what does that say about us and what does it in fact do to us ourselves, let alone the elephants? Ecological catastrophe has been wrought in the name of this survival, sheer existing without heed to any quality of existing. Objectively, in terms of how we have acted it out, this default utilitarianism has been very harmful to us, let alone other lifeforms. That says it all, doesn't it? It's like that language about the bottom line. We may feel bad about workers suffer-ing, but profits must be maintained, corporations must go on existing for the sake of existing. These two types of thought - about survival and bottom lines - are synonymous. > This means that art and art appreciation won't stay still, in the way that a lot of art theory (for instance in Kant) wants. And in the absence of a single authoritative (anthropocentric) standard of taste with which to judge art, how we regard it is also about how wholes are always less than the sums of their parts. > There is something inherently weird, even disgusting, about beauty itself, and this weirdness gets mixed back in when we consider things in an ecological way. This is because beauty just hap-pens, without our ego cooking it up. The experience of beauty itself is an entity that isn't 'me. This means that the experience has an intrinsic weirdness to it. > This is why other people's taste might come across as bizarre or kitschy. The aesthetic experience is about solidarity with what is given. It's a solidarity, a feeling of alreadiness, for no reason in particular, with no agenda in particular - like evolution, like the biosphere. There is no good reason to distinguish between nonhumans that are 'natural' and ones that are 'artificial', by which we mean made by humans. It just becomes too difficult to sustain such distinctions. Since, therefore, an artwork is itself a nonhuman being, this solidarity in the artistic realm is already solidarity with nonhumans, whether or not art is explicitly ecological. Ecologically explicit art is simply art that brings this solidarity with the nonhuman to the foreground. > I want to take an entirely different approach. I want to persuade you that you are already being eco-logical, and that expressing that in social space might not involve something radically, religiously differ-ent. Don't think this means that nothing changes, that you are just the same when you know about being ecological. It's rather hard to describe what happens, but something does happen. It's like someone slit your being with a very sharp and therefore imperceptible scalpel. You started bleeding every-where. It's something like that. > 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 conceptualise 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. > A 12,500-year-long social, philosophical and psychic logistics is now showing its colours, and they are disastrous. > 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. ## Notes - [Agrilogistics](https://www.changingweathers.net/en/episodes/48/what-is-dark-ecology/), an interesting concept mentioned.. - [[Marina Zurkow]] - mentioned as a modern artist doing climate change themed work. ## Summary ### Highlights #### Tuning Philosophy, which is wonderment (hence horror, or eroticism, or anger, or laughter) in conceptual form, is an attunement to the way a thing is a portal for the future future. The love of wisdom implies that wisdom isn't fully here, at least not yet. Perhaps if it ever succeeded in teleporting down perfectly, it would cease to be philosophy. Thank heavens philosophy isn't wisdom. If it is, I want nothing to do with philosophy. In a universe governed by the speed of light, parts are hidden, withdrawn, obscure. The dark Dantean forest of the Universe, an underwater forest of rippling weeds. You should find this idea extremely comforting. It means that you cannot be omnipresent or omniscient. The idea that I'm outside the world, looking in, wondering which choice to make, is the ethical equivalent of the substance ontology that separates being from appearance with firewalls and fungi-cides. But the traditionalist 'conservative' versions of this line of thought, called 'environmental-ism', also try to contain wavering, the hesitation filled with the vibrations of attunement. It's called environmentalism, but it's not en-vir-onmental enough. And this isn't surprising, because 'traditional' agrilogistics ends up as our current version, so that there is a line from the notion of the guiding weight of tradition to the play of infinite (human) freedom and 'choice.’ #### The Uncanny Valley The word for familiar and strange at the same time is uncanny. there is something strange that happens in the appreciation of art, which many philosophers have found disturbing. It's disturbing how the experience of relating to art, for example, makes it difficult - sometimes impossible - to sustain the valley across which we see other entities as 'other. Let's see how. It's pretty obvious that art has an effect on me, and this effect is to a large extent unbidden: 1 didn't ask for it, which is part of the fun. I had no idea I could be affected in precisely this way. When you think about it like this, you can see why being able to appreciate ambiguity is at the basis of being ecological. *You don't know why you should care:* isn't that what we are all feeling when we experience something beautiful? How come this chord sequence is making tears run down my face? If you can list all the reasons why you should' love this particular person, you are probably not in love. If you have no idea, you might be nearer the mark. #### X-Ecology  I’m saying that being ecological isn't the same as being religious in a tight way, even though it isn't the same as being an atheist in a tight way either - because that's just upside-down religion. Since organized religion is an agricultural-age way for agricultural society to understand itself, it is riddled with the kinds of bug that have helped to destroy Earth. 'Store up your treasure in heaven' (as Jesus advises) means you don't need to worry so much about what happens down here, because it's less real and less important. Heidegger observed that Christianity was Platonism for the masses. I'm observing that, historically speaking at least, Platonism is Neolithic theism for the educated elite. We are so busy, and our current neoliberal machinations are just the latest upgrade to a busy, busy mentality that has been gripping us since 10,000 BCE. The one emotion we love to hate in the media is apathy. I don't want to live in the world that kind of machinating would bring about. It would make the ways in which this current world sucks (to use a Gen-X term) look like the best thing that ever happened to anyone. I'm talking about a world based on greater and greater efficiency, greater and greater control of energy. You can see this is how some people think about an ecological society. Instead, I think it's a world in which we can be so much more generous and creative than we've ever been, so much less 'caring' in that way that is hostile to actual lifeforms: survival mode. You don't have to be ecological. Because you are ecological. `Concepts:` [[Ecology|Ecology]]