“…one heck of a giant myth…”
Nicholas Hanford
December 5, 2013
Morton Day
Unethical Readings
“It could be sharks…” (US, 1)
“…some kind of stuff called capital.” (US, 1)
“…our probing, a grey goo.” (US, 1)
“But have I ever seen matter or stuff as such?” (US, 1)
“…what exactly are we sustaining…” (US, 2)
“…threateningly minute…” (US, 3)
“And I believe that the choice resembles a choice between grayish brown and brownish gray.” (US, 3)
“Remember what life was like in 1510?” (US, 6)
“…absurdly easy, as the toy experiment proves.” (US, 7)
“Stupid Kids’ Toy 5” (US, 7)
“…teeming with parasites. Like skin.” (ETTE, 2)
“…’species’ is entirely specious…” (ETTE, 6)
“…evolution does not care about webbed feet.” (ETTE, 6)
“Is it artificially intelligent? Are we?” (ETTE, 11)
Ethical Readings
Morton – “Unsustaining”
“Let’s consider the unit of capitalism: the turning of raw materials into products. Now for a capitalist, the raw materials are not strictly natural. They simply pre-exist whatever labor process the capitalist is going to exert on them.” (1)
“Nature is the featureless remainder at either end of the process of production. Either it’s exploitable stuff, or value-added stuff. Whatever: it’s basically featureless, abstract, grey. … You will never find Nature. That’s why I put it in capitals. I want the reader to se that it’s an empty category looking for something to fill it.” (1)
“Nature is precisely the lump that pre-exists the capitalist labor process.” (1)
“Stockpiling is the dominant mode of existence. … Nature is stockpiling. … The eerie strangeness of this fact confronts us with the ways in which we still believe that Nature is ‘over there’—that it exists apart from technology, apart from history. Far from it. Nature is the stockpile of stockpiles.” (2)
“The problem, then, is not essentialism but this very notion of a beyond. … The essence of reality is capital and Nature. Both exist in an ethereal beyond. Over here, where we live, is an oil spill. But don’t worry. The beyond will take care of it.” (2)
“When we flush the toilet, we imagine that the U-bend takes the waste away into some ontologically alien realm. … He [Marx] didn’t see how a kind of hypersolidity oozes back in to the emptied out space of capitalism, a hypersolidity I call here hyperobjects.” (3)
“The beautiful reversibility of the oily, melting mirror speaks to something that is happening in a global warming age, precisely because of the hyperobjects: the simultaneous dissolution of reality and the overwhelming presence of hyperobjects, which stick to us, which are us.” (4)
“Which in turn is a symptom of a profound upgrade on our ontological tools. As anyone who has waited while the little rainbow circle goes around and around on a Mac, these upgrades are not necessarily pleasant.” (5)
“Because the world as such—not just a certain idea of world but world in its entirety—has evaporated. Or rather, we are realizing that we never had it in the first place.” (5)
“If those Arctic summers continue in any way, and it we can model them as symptoms of global warming, it is the case that there never was a genuine, meaningful (for us humans) sweltering summer, just a long period of sweltering that seemed real because it kept on repeating for say two or three millennia. … we took it to be a reliable world that was actually just a habitual pattern…” (5)
“You have a few seconds for amazement as the fantasy that you inhabited a neat, seamless little world melts away. … By postponing doom into some hypothetical future, these narratives inoculate us against the very real object that has intruded into ecological, social and psychic space.” (6)
“The specialness we granted ourselves as unravelers of cosmic meaning…falls apart since there is no meaningfulness possible in a world without a foreground-background distinction.” (6)
“World turns out to be an aesthetic effect based on a kind of blurriness and aesthetic distance. This blurriness derives from an entity’s ignorance concerning objects. Only in ignorance can objects act like blank screens for the projection of meaning.” (7)
“The idea of world depends upon all kinds of mood lighting and mood music, aesthetic effects that by definition contain a kernel of sheer ridiculous meaninglessness.” (7)
Morton – “Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology”
“One damaged concept is ‘Nature’—I capitalize it to denature it—damaged and damaging, almost useless for developing ecological culture. Of far greater benefit would be concepts that ruthlessly denature and de-essentialise: they are called deconstruction.” (1)
“Signs are interdependent. The existence of a sign implies coexistence with other signs.” (2)
“The text-context distinction is only an interpretive convenience. …rather, texts are other texts: texting is the differential process by which and as which texts exist as such, as strangers to themselves.” (2)
“…genotext, which like genotype (from which it derives) is the genome of the text, the factors that produce it like an algorithm or recipe produces a set of results.” (3)
“These environments are made of signs, yet the matter-sign distinction breaks down at a certain point, because one of these environments is the environment. … No textuality can rigorously distinguish between inside and outside, because that is precisely what Textuality both broaches and breeches.” (3)
“For truly empiricism is the study of relationships between things, and of things as sets of relationships, rather than solid seeming objects separated by empty seeming space.” (4)
“All the way down to the sub-DNA level, evolution is a set of algorithmic processes.” (4)
“An algorithm is a script—a text—that automates a function, or functions, and in this case the script is encoded directly into matter.” (4)
“Looking at like forms is never looking at the here and now, and never looking in place; they are palimpsests of displacements and rewritings and iterations.” (5)
“DNA is a hybrid palimpsest of additions, deletions, viral code insertions and so on: there is no way to ascertain whether one piece of DNA is more ‘authentic’ than another.” (7)
“This is the view of the ‘extended phenotype’: DNA is not limited to the physical boundaries of life forms, but rather expresses itself in and as what we call ‘the environment.’” (8)
“The view of the extended phenotype drastically expands what environmentalism—qua protecting ‘habitats’—must think and do, because there is no niche as opposed to organism; there is only the genome and the biosphere.” (8)
“…’extended phenotext’ that does not stop at the front and back pages of a printed work.” (9)
“Darwinism frees the mind for an ethics and politics based not on soulless authoritarianism, but on intimacy with coexisting strange others (Autrui), because Darwinism shows how utterly flimsy and contingent and non-teleological the biosphere is.” (9)
“This poem alludes to the legalistic nicety that leaves no page unwritten.” (10)
“Strangely, …we can introduce blank space into blank space. The ‘blank’ itself—“ (12)
“What is the smallest indicator that we are in a zone of meaning?” (12)
“Yet although the Mark as concept is decisively on this side of signification, the sign ‘Mark’ and its graphic symbol are more ambiguous, making the boundary between this and that side as fuzzy as possible. But since that side (the a-signifying side) may only appear in contrast to this side, the distinction re-emerges at another level. The Mark appears in a field that is paradoxically already ‘Marked’: an infinite regress.” (13)
“It is a pre-poetic poem, a piece of self-referential code stuck to another replicating medium (the page).” (14)
“This is not here.” (15)