Morton on The Conversation

Our keynote speaker appeared in June on this awesome web series, explaining something of what he does:



See the original here.

Considering Dark Ecology

What is dark ecology?  Where does it happen within a broader ecological conversation?  Levi Bryant's thoughts in "Black Ecology: A Pessimistic Moment" might help (you can find the original here):

Perhaps I’m just having a dark moment right now, or perhaps this is what I really think. I’m not sure. Right now I’m in the process of working out my thoughts on black ecology for Jeffrey Cohen’s University of Minnesota Press collection entitled Prismatic Ecologies. To be honest, I’m still not entirely sure what I have in mind by a “black ecology”. I know some general outlines of the concept: 

     1) Being is radically a-teleological or without purpose.
     2) Life is no more privileged than inorganic matter within the order of being.
     3) Positive feedback phenomena (systems running out of control) are every bit as common      as negative feedback (systems that regulate themselves or strive for homeostasis).
     4) “Ecology” does not signify “nature” (or that which is outside of culture), but systems of interdependent relations.

Exploring Hyperobjects

Reading Jane Bennett's response to Tim Morton and Graham Harman in the recent OOO NLH, I stumbled across this illuminating micro-essay by Morton on hyperobjects at The Contemporary Condition.  It begins:

In the liner notes to Stop Making Sense, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne wrote “Nuclear weapons could wipe out life on Earth, if used properly.” The brilliant fake naivety of this seemingly obvious remark should make us pause. We have indeed created things that we can hardly understand, let alone control, let alone make sensible political decisions about. Sometimes it's good to have new words for these things, to remind you of how mind-blowing they are. So I'm going to introduce a new term: hyperobjects. Hyperobjects are phenomena such as radioactive materials and global warming. Hyperobjects stretch our ideas of time and space, since they far outlast most human time scales, or they're massively distributed in terrestrial space and so are unavailable to immediate experience. In this sense, hyperobjects are like those tubes of toothpaste that say they contain 10% extra: there's more to hyperobjects than ordinary objects...