Being Ecological

by Timothy Morton

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.

the big picture here is that your ideas about, and your feelings about, and your plans about, lifeforms and the biosphere coexist along with lifeforms and the biosphere. They are part of what is connected together.

You aren’t outside the biosphere looking in. You are glued to it, in a way that’s much more super than Super Glue. How so? You are glued to the biosphere phenomenologically. This means that even if you are physically far away from it – if you could take a tape measure and figure out that you were 200,000 kilometres away, outside Earth’s gravitational field, you would still be ‘in’ it in a phenomenological sense, based on the kind of philosophical argument we have just been exploring.

Art is a place where we get to see what it means to be human or whatever, which is why what I do is called humanities. But this isn’t enough. One way this becomes obvious is when writing grant proposals that sound like pleading. Please, please don’t hurt me, Mr Funding Source, I’m a sort of educated PR guy who is going to decorate this boring cupcake of scientism with these nice human-flavoured meaning-candies.

Death means either totally not existing at all, or going around and around exactly the same all the time, like a perpetual motion machine – here’s what I mean. Pop songs often have plenty of death in them, because death is very smooth and goes down easy; when I say death in pop, I mean the obvious, dull to some four-to-the-floor rhythms, the regular rhymes, the easy-to-hold-on-to earworms. As an artist you can either cheat death, or you can become death. Many a pop singer is death incarnate, because death always goes to number 1. Don’t mistake those upbeat lyrics and dancey tunes for life. The frantic, maniacal repetition is exactly what Freud calls death drive. That kind of song is trying to parcel life energies into nice neat death packets. From this point of view, the trouble with some pop isn’t that it’s low or bad taste. It’s that it’s death warmed up enough (but not too much) to be a bit tasty. Death is powerful and compelling; life is fragile and shivery.

Reasons for being nice to other lifeforms abound, but around them there is a ghostly penumbra of feelings of appreciating them for no reason at all. Just loving something never has a great reason attached to it. 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.

Although it sounds very reasonable, something is drastically missing from the style of restricted economy, which means that in the end it’s at the very least spiritually unsatisfying for those who try to maintain it. Because malfunctioning is deeper than (smooth) functioning, there is an excessive intensity to the energy of things that just can’t be contained efficiently. There is a lack of attention to what is being efficiently sustained. And as the model of efficiency will always be a little bit behind the times (if only by a few moments – you can’t be radically proactive because you need to gather data about the current situation in order to work with it in an efficient way), it won’t ever accurately track the way things are, despite the promise that it could.

Moreover, the ultimate horizon of efficiency is petroculture: the fact that oil, a precious toxic resource, dictates how we conduct ourselves. In a world without oil, we shouldn’t be imagining ecological action in the key of oil.

Being ecological is like being a teacher. When you first start teaching, you try so hard to teach that it becomes excruciating. You want your students to like you. You want to like them. You don’t want to feel this excruciating feeling that you yourself are generating by trying so hard. You start to work with aggression (or you quit). You realize that you are a channel for your and your students’ negative as well as positive feelings, and your job is to hold those feelings for the students’ benefit. Then you wonder why you are trying so hard, and maybe you start to let go. You begin to trust. You begin to realize that you are a teacher, no matter what, because at least one other person knows you’re their teacher. You can relax into that. It’s the same when you’re a parent. You spend some time trying desperately to be a parent. And then once you realize that you just are a parent, you can relax. At least someone knows you’re their parent.