Week 3 - readings: Tim Morton, queer ecology, and "strange strangers"

I'm still figuring out how I feel about Morton's ideas (I'm a bit wary of anyone who describes themself as a "prophet"...) but there are some interesting ideas in his work.

To the right is the first video in a short series from Timothy Morton describing his work and concepts around "the Mesh" in ecological thinking. (Good summary if you don't feel like reading or want a quick recap; multiple parts)

• The Interdependence Theorem: for every A, the existence of A is such that A consists of things that are not not A; the only way to define A is negatively and differentially. Things are only what they are because they are not other things, but things also are derived from things. Nothing exists by itself, and nothing comes from nothing. The theorem describes language, life forms, etc. Everything is linked in some way, shape or fashion

• DNA is a language, and can be modelled via structuralism; language is a system subject to deconstruction; the system of life is also therefore potentially subject to deconstruction

• references Derrida - "the structurality of structure"; language and meaning is infinite, but also dependent on meaninglessness; a system with no centre and no edge; language as a system is not an object but an infinite network with neither inside nor outside; language is a "moving target", and coherence, in order to be coherent, must contain some incoherence

• lifeforms constitute a mesh that is infinite and beyond concept - there is no "human flavoured DNA, no daffodil-flavoured DNA", only arrangement; describing this is hard - web is too vitalist and too internet-ish, network is a bit too structured, so he landed on "mesh", as it means both the holes in the network and the threads between them and is applicable across a range of fields

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Below are a few notes from Morton's article in the course reader, "Thinking Ecology: The Mesh, The Strange Stranger, and the Beautiful Soul".

Strange strangers

Timothy Morton, Professor of Literature and Environment at the University of California, often discusses the notion of "strange strangers" in his work - a term he uses to describe non-human entities imagined as ambiguous rather than defined by human terms, and beings unable to be completely comprehended or labelled.

"Strange strangers are uncanny, familiar and strange simultaneously. …They cannot be thought as part of a series (such as species or genus) without violence. [Their] uniqueness is not such that they are independent...they are composites of other strange strangers. Every life-form is familiar since we are related to it. We share its DNA, its cell structure, the subroutines in the software of its brain. Its unicity implies its capacity to participate in a collective.”

The violence I think Morton is referring to is the flattening effect of trying to isolate in definition nonhuman creatures, objects and entities as doing so often fail to acknowledge the intricate web of meaning and being they inhabit, and their role within it, as well as their connections; and tends to remove ourselves as beings from the equation. Ecological thinking that goes beyond seeing “nature” and “environment” as other to or removed from human existence has the potential to encourage us (in Western industrial societies) to move away from an anthropocentric view of the world and to question the boundaries and concepts we believe in around these topics, including our place in the world but also down to the language we use to talk about it - as Donna Haraway says, "Thinking matters! Words matter!". For Morton, "the life-non-life boundary is not thin and it is not rigid" (271). This idea isn't new by any means; it has been discussed by indigenous scholars for some time. Morton seems to write from a place of actively looking at the Anthropocene and Western industrial conceptualisations of the world, and asks us to re-examine how and why we think of nature and ourselves in the way that we do, and what we could do differently:

“The ecological thought imagines interconnectedness, which I call the mesh. Who or what is interconnected with what or with whom? The mesh of interconnected things is vast, perhaps immeasurably so. Each entity in the mesh looks strange. Nothing exists all by itself, and so nothing is fully “itself.” ...Our encounter with other beings becomes profound. They are strange, even intrinsically strange. Getting to know them makes them stranger. When we talk about life forms, we’re talking about strange strangers. The ecological thought imagines a multitude of entangled strange strangers... Our encounter with other beings – and with our being as other – is strange strangeness.” ("Thinking Ecology: The Mesh, the Strange Stranger, and the Beautiful Soul" (2010).)

Under this description, existence is acknowledged as impossibly rhizomatic - sprawling in its connections and influences. Rather than neatly categorisable or static in their definitions and nature, Morton asserts that both human and non-human entities as we know them are unable to be meaningfully described or isolated by the rhetoric we have at our disposal, suggesting that attempting to do so is in itself a continual act of violence - "there is no nature, never was, never will be" (279):

"Living things surprise us all the time. Humans are just describing things with blunt senses. According to us, animals could not feel pain. We know now that is not true. Once we thought animals could not use language. This seems outdated. Every time we move the goal post of what makes a person, some animal somewhere proves us wrong... [The Biosphere] is permeable and boundariless … if anything life is catastrophic, monstrous, nonholistic, and dislocated, not organic, coherent, or authoritative.”

This line reminds me of one of my favourite philosophical stories, in which Diogenes took aim at Plato's description of humans as "featherless bipeds" by plucking a chicken, bringing it into Plato's Academy and announcing "behold! I've brought you a man!". A silly analogy; nature, identity, existence, is all very slippery.

Queer Ecology

In the article "Living with "Strange Strangers": Queer Ecology is a Framework to break down boundaries", writer Nathan Allen further discusses Morton's ideas around the application of queer theory to ecological thought, specifically his theory around the idea of "queer ecology", which aims to stray away from heteronormative, patriarchal, and hierarchical ways of thinking about life in the Anthropocene:

"Queer ecology requires a vocabulary envisioning this liquid life... [Morton proposes] that life-forms constitute a mesh, a nontotalizable, open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur and confound boundaries at practically any level: between species, between the living and the nonliving, between organism and environment. Visualizing the mesh is difficult… Queer ecology as Morton will go on to construct is a sort of camp-esque, but critical study of how boundaries in biology are not real at all. What’s more is that the maintenance of such barriers often results in metaphorical, emotional, and physical violence. Queer ecology is not radical as Morton writes... “evolution means that life forms are made of other life forms. Entities are mutually determining: they exist in relation to each other and derive from each other. Nothing exists independently, and nothing comes from nothing. At the DNA level, it’s impossible to tell a “genuine” code sequence from a viral code insertion. In bacteria, for example, there exist plasmids, entities not unlike pieces of viral code. Plasmids resemble parasites in the bacterial host, but at this scale it’s impossible to tell which being is a parasite and which a host..."

Morton suggests that Western "historical account of nature [as] a thing with boundaries" is often limiting and enforces an anthropocentric, human subject/natural object relationship - "things are either natural or they are not. Nature under this distinction is metaphysically closed... Queer ecology may espouse something very different from individualism, rugged or otherwise" The idea of strange strangers in relation to this idea encourages us to think about the paradoxes and flux in identity within the labels “human” and “non-human” as well as within the concepts of “self” and “other” in relation to ecology. In recognising agencies and vitality beyond ourselves as human beings, Morton suggests that it is also possible to think of other entities (suggesting even sounds or works of art as examples) as "phenomenological beings" that in some way display “something like agency and something like affect.”

A heteronormative ecology, perhaps what we call a standard ecology, is uncritical and serves to demarcate this thing from that thing. Queer ecology tells us this is but a semantic game, not a description of reality. Organisms are being born of others, being killed by others, feeding on others, evolving into and from others, going extinct because of others. That relational bit to others is the important part. Nothing exists alone. Morton writes: In a sense, molecular biology confronts issues of authenticity similar to those in textual studies. Just as deconstruction showed that, at a certain level at any rate, no text is totally authentic, biology shows us that there is no authentic life-form.

I think that there is definitely a tendency for things to be put in boxes or classified as separate entities from others in ways that leave interconnection and ambiguity unacknowledged. On the flip side, categorisation, for the scientists I know, allows for the studying of individual elements in isolation and an understanding of the "mesh's" individual components to a greater degree. Perhaps this is a difference in field or thinking between philosophy, arts and sciences... I am lucky to have several passionate biologist friends, and while anecdotal in nature I can't say the "uncritical" line of thought Morton describes is something I've experienced from them; most have a deep reverence for the natural world and all the intricacies of the systems that happen within it, the interconnectedness of everything from macro- to micro-level (perhaps I'm just lucky with the scientists I know).

I also gravitate towards the attitudes expressed in Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter and Lauren Greyson's Vital Reenchantments, the latter which suggests that rather than a dull or sterile tool for examining the world that scientific ontology can be utilised as a means of reenchanting ourselves with the wonders of the natural world, not in a utopian or romanticised way, but in a way that acknowledges the vast networks of interconnectivity that facilitate life on earth (and beyond) as we know (and don't know) it. Perhaps their work and Mortons are two sides to the same coin. I agree with Morton in his criticisms of Heidegger (discussed in his article) that it's important we don't stray into romanticising our part in the ecological mesh or removing ourselves from it (something Donna Haraway also discusses in her writing), and the rhetoric we use to talk about the natural world, even the concept of nature itself, should be examined and questioned. There's a lot to unpack from his work, and this article has only scratched the surface slightly...