Timothy Morton. The Ecological Thought.

Gidal, Eric

Timothy Morton. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. 163. $39.95.

Reviewing Timothy Morton's new book for readers of this journal presents a particular challenge. Although Morton's scholarship has contributed much to Romantic studies, his most recent work is not primarily, or even secondarily, a contribution to the study of Romanticism. Although it contains suggestive readings of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and "Old Man Travelling," as well as passing references to Kantian aesthetics and Shelley's politics and poetics, it may more properly be understood as a Romanticist's response to environmental catastrophe. Not a Romantic response, it should be stressed, for Morton is concerned here, as he was in his last book Ecology Without Nature (Harvard, 2007, to which this book is an ostensible "prequel"), to purge environmentalism of many of the bad habits inherited from Romanticism so as to construct a postmodern ecological ethics more proper to our present condition. Yet, for scholars of Romanticism, this project has much to teach, both for Morton's insistence upon a public and ethical role for literary criticism and for his demonstration of just how difficult Romantic habits of mind are to escape.

As in his last book, the primary task here is to exorcise Nature, that reified and commodified abstraction that has served both capitalist exploitation and fascist manipulation in the modern era. Caught in a trap of unproductive mourning for a maternal origin and ground of being that never existed, modern environmentalists, in Morton's account, are as much a part of the problem as corporate polluters and recalcitrant politicians. In a stinging reading of Pall Skulason's Reflections on the Edge of Askja (University of Iceland Press, 2006), offered as a representative work of environmental reflection, Morton observes a fruitless and even destructive repetition in rhetorical evocations of Nature as a reality independent of human failings and limitations. Much as he critiqued the immersive rhetoric of "ecomimesis" in Ecology Without Nature, Morton is keen here to observe not simply the futility of such figurative accounts of the character of Nature, but their pernicious logic whereby the divisions between humanity and the lifeworld are simply reinscribed, taking us no closer to any meaningful action in the world. From eighteenth-century technologies of the picturesque to current aestheticized visions of the environment as the template for self-actualization, these Romantic models of Nature obscure precisely what is most essential about our ecological condition: namely the interconnected and constantly evolving "mesh" of particles and energies that encompasses all life and matter on this planet.

Darwin is the real hero of Morton's book. He cites Blake's marginal attack on Wordsworth's celebration of the fit of Mind and Nature--"You shall not bring me down to believe such fitting & fitted ... & please your lordship"--so as to underscore the radically destabilizing implications of evolutionary theory for either end of Wordsworth's equation. Whereas the high Romantic narrative of maternal origins and teleological conclusions promotes a vision of organic community and spiritual apotheosis, categories of purpose and intentionality that exclude a truly dynamic abundance, Darwinian theory emphasizes "proliferation, randomness, contingency, and useless display" (37). Once we abandon arguments for intrinsic subjectivities or isolated organisms, we also abandon arguments for environments as pre-determining conditions for their emergence. Although he critiques neoclassical models of unity and order, Morton isn't buying into notions of organic form or Romantic vitalism either, so that even the category of "life" itself becomes suspect as we realize that "material organization turns out to be sets of formal relationships, not squishy stuff" (68).

Morton has in mind algorithmic chaos theory and the models of embodied cognition of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, but Blake's "The Fly" would also contribute to his dictate that "the ecological thought should not set consciousness up as yet another defining trait of superiority over non-humans" (72). Akin to Raphael's speculative evocation of other worlds in Paradise Lost and to the "earthrise" image taken by the Apollo 11 mission, fractal mappings of generation and cognition resist any scale of perception as normative and instead demand a contemplation of vast expanses and minute particulars as equally constitutive demarcations of the living world. Morton urges us to "think big" and imagine a "progressive ecology" that is global and even universal in its frame of reference. "Our slogan," he suggests, "should be dislocation, dislocation, dislocation" (28). Certainly, in an age of climate change and dwindling biodiversity, playing to the local has its limitations as it can blind us to the necessary scales of space and of time needed to comprehend the implications of such global challenges. But Morton is after even more than an expanded time scale or a globalized perception of interdependence, for be wishes to clear away all distinctions between creatures and environments so as to emphasize the "mesh"--his preferred term for "the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things" (28). Once we eliminate any privilege of scale or standard by which Nature, environment, consciousness, and humanity may be fixed, we are open to the ecological thought with "no center and no edge" (31), a revival of Heraclitus' dictum panta rhei, "everything flows" (43).

This is not a reprise of the Romantic sublime, with its chastening, ennobling, and sometime authoritarian dynamics, which simply reinscribes power in the fantasy of an imperious I. If anything, it is a reprise of Romantic melancholy, that dark side of the sublime, which Morton is eager to claim as an ancient model of earth consciousness. His promotion of "dark ecology," here, in Ecology Without Nature, and in another recent chapter in The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy (Oxford, 2010), is a resistance to "mourning for a mother we never had" while at the same time "coping with a catastrophe that, from the evidence of the hysterical announcements of its imminent arrival, has already occurred" (17). "What we call Nature is really just solidified history that we aren't studying closely enough" (42), Morton concludes in one of the more useful formulations in this study, and hence we are able to read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner less as a homily about "all creatures great and small" and more as a traumatic awakening to coexistence and "Old Man Travelling" as a realization of ethical obligations to the "strange stranger" (49). "Reading poetry won't save the planet," Morton admits, offering an implicit rebuke to John Felstiner's recent "field guide to nature poems," Can Poetry Save the Earth? (Yale, 2009), "but art can allow us to glimpse beings that exist beyond or between our normal categories" (60). For once we recognize the perilous condition of our world not as a loss but as an awakening, we are liberated to move forward in a more productive and reasonable fashion. Eschewing both apocalyptic and nostalgic reflexes, Morton suggests that a postmodern ecology will embrace the future as one of evolutionary change and ambient consciousness. The result is a vision of interconnectedness that negates all categorical distinctions, an animism that avoids even the privileging of living over non-living things, which Morton signifies with a strikethrough as "[begin strike through]ani mism[end strike through]" (110). This neologism-by-negation counters Romantic environmentalism and may provide a framework for ethical obligation independent of standards of authenticity, identification, humanity, utility, or self- realization.

There's a problem here, and it's one that Morton fully recognizes. Once you have de-centered subjectivity and exorcized Nature, what basis is there for such ethical action? "We need justifications for our actions that go beyond bankrupt and downright dangerous self-interest theories" (131), he argues, but what justifications are possible once you've eviscerated both a subject who acts and a normative universal--be it God, or Nature, or Law, or humanity--by which such actions may be measured? If all is evolutionary flux, why worry about preservation or inheritance, to say nothing of animal welfare, biodiversity, or human health? Morton's answer, like any good Shelleyan, is love, "that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive or fear or hope beyond ourselves when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void and seek to awaken in all things that are a community with what we experience within ourselves" (Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 2nd edn., ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat [Norton, 2002], 503). Morton doesn't cite these lines here, but they seem to articulate the combination of dislocation and embrace informing his ecological ethic. Levinas is more present in this work than any Romantic poet, providing both the epigraph ("Infinity overflows the thought that thinks it") and the general argument that our confrontation with radical alterity unfolds an endlessly proliferating engagement with the infinite defined through obligation. "How to care for the neighbor, the strange stranger, and the hyper-object, are the long-term problems posed by the ecological thought" (135), Morton concludes, and the ambition of this book might be characterized as a search for new bases of ethical behavior not grounded in the compromised motives of categorical imperatives or personal gratification. That such an ethics is more evoked than explicated is not so much a fault as it is a characteristic of Morton's aim to motivate ecocritical reflections through provocative negation.

Morton is surely right to question the teleological fantasias of organic Nature that modern environmentalism has inherited from Romanticism, and he is at his most trenchant, here and in his earlier work, when he is deconstructing the rhetorical sleights-of-hand by which Nature is deployed as a cover for totalizing ideologies. But for all of his insistence upon the ecological thought (emphasis his) as capacious and collective, the amount of space devoted to purging nonconformity in this book raises concerns for the utility of such ideological critique. "It's not simply a matter of what you're thinking about," he insists, "it's also a matter of how you think" (6). I'm sure I've missed some of the ideological heresies Morton consequently banishes, but in 135 pages he excommunicates localism, holism, atomism, organicism, Puritanism (by which he means any discussion of limits to human consumption), masculinity, cuteness, nostalgia, wilderness preservation, deep ecology, Gaian geophysiology, community, sincerity, individualism, post-humanism, consequentialism, neoliberalism, capitalism, authority, harmony, biopower and sustainability. Corporate polluters and climate-change deniers come in for brief dismissals, but Morton is not interested in any sustained critique of such "hapless reactionaries" (116). His primary target, and his primary audience, is the environmental left, whose continued allegiances to compromised visions of ecological consciousness must be eliminated. They are "part of the problem," a point that reoccurs through out this book, while the solution is a purified vision of animism, make that [begin strike through]animism[end strike through], which conveniently reaffirms many current political predilections of the left, from gay rights (see his guest column on "Queer Ecology" in PMLA 125, no. 2 [2010]: 273-82) and rights for the disabled, to vegetarianism (of the right kind), and collective action. One may concur with many of the positions Morton takes yet still feel a bit uneasy with the long list of enemies that seems to include everyone but an increasingly invoked rhetorical "we." The party is getting mighty small. By the time he dismisses Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring has arguably had more influence in the direction of planetary health than any single publication of the past century, but which Morton criticizes for being too apocalyptic, I'd decided to sign up elsewhere.

There is much that is useful in this book for students of ecocriticism and of Romanticism, but if Morton's objective is to find a public role for scholarship, then a less exclusionary model of ecological thought might be what's called for. If public scholarship on the ecological challenges of the twenty-first century is to be enabling, rather than divisive, it may need to find a more tolerant vision of ethical motive. Bill McKibben has renamed Earth Eaarth to emphasize the fundamental alterations already visited upon our planet, and thus presumably would concur with Morton's critique of Nature as a distracting illusion, but his 350 organization rightly emphasizes work as a response to political atrophy surrounding the dangers of climate change. Morton recognizes our collective responsibility for global warming and the necessity of immediate action, yet worries about "an ideological injunction to act 'Now!' while humanists are tasked with slowing down, using our minds to find out what this all means" (117). The Ecological Thought will be most successful if it encourages more of us to bridge this divide and find a voice for slow time within an accelerating, and deteriorating, world.

Eric Gidal

University of Iowa