Timothy Morton - Ecologocentrism. Unworking Animals

University of Wisconsin Press
Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals

Author(s): Timothy Morton
Source: SubStance, Vol. 37, No. 3, Issue 117: The Political Animal (2008), pp. 73-96
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
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Ecologocentrism:
Unworking Animals
Timothy Morton
. . .with
those
toward
glance
not
exclude
myself,
which
I do
when
faced
of
the
terrifying
?
Jacques
is in the
in
nonspecies,
form
under
only
mute,
formless,
"Structure,
Sign,
of the Human
is the wisest
a cross
and
as
so,
from
away
is
which
is necessary
the
species
and
infant,
of monstrosity.
Derrida,
the Discourse
Whoever
do
offing,
the
in a society
their
eyes
unnamable
can
and which
a birth
turn
the as yet
by
itself
proclaiming
whenever
who,
between
among
you
and
plant
Sciences"
is also
and
just
a conflict
ghost.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Friedrich Nietzsche,
in
Play
(293)
(6)
Nature1
Ecology without
in its appropriation
has damaged
One of the things that modernity
one of the damaged
ideas
of the Earth has been thinking. Unfortunately,
this word where necessary,
is that of Nature
itself. (I shall be capitalizing
we transition from seeing
itsmetaphysical
to highlight
qualities.) How do
what we call "Nature" as an object "over yonder"? And how do we
the same
versions
that end up doing much
avoid "new and improved"
or
Deleuze-and-Guattari
pantheism,
theory, Spinozan
thing (systems
and so on), just in a "cooler," more
type worlds of interlocking machines,
kinds
of
What
emerge when we think
collectivity
sophisticated
way?
we
coexist
without
with nonhumans
ecology without Nature? How do
in their introduction
and Chris Danta
Dimitris Vardoulakis
issue call the "social fantasies that create and sustain a collective
is exercised"?
the name of whom violence
what
to this
'we' in
I reference
idea of the
animals"
Jean-Luc Nancy's
By "unworking
from
Maurice
Blanchot's
of
derived
"community
unworking"
of the Romantic
fragment poem. Ifwe make animals truly
interpretation
we
if
this
include them on "this" side of social collectivity,
"political,"
collectivity
Board
SubStance
will
be radically
of Regents,
#117,
Vol.
University
37, no.
redefined.
of Wisconsin
Yet
"unworking
System,
2008
animals"
73
3, 2008
also
74 Timothy Morton
the deconstructive
work of undoing
the general category of
emphasizes
in his essay on the
"the animal," a work
Derrida
(or unwork?) begun by
occasion
of his cat looking back at his naked body ("The Animal
That
IAm"). For to encounter what we commonly
Therefore
call animals is to
be confronted
with
the inadequacy
of the idea of an essential,
central
"nature."
in the notion
of
The issue is upgraded,
but not transcended,
tries to be a "new and improved"
version of the
which
"environment,"
reified substance or essence called "nature." Until recently, the left has
into account together with race, class, and gender.
to take ecology
as intrinsic to these complexly
be
should
viewed
Ecology
intermingled
as outside or beside them. As Walter Benjamin writes
than
rather
spheres
a topic for collective
in the Arcades Project, when
the weather
becomes
over
it stops being
that thing
there called the
(as now),
imagination
failed
in the cycle of the eternally

until the
selfsame,
(convolute Kl,
[it] in politics and history emerges"
nonhumans
become politicized,
they lose their place
It "stand[s]
seizes upon
weather.
collective
5).2 Likewise, when

invisible
in "the eternally
and "the animal"?that
selfsame,"
mythical,
like
"the
Even
"the
animal
beast?withers
Jewish
(how
away.
question"
starts to look fishy.
question")
The problem of "the political animal" is also a symptom of the failure
to approach
each other
of ecological
thinking, and of deconstruction,
an
of
shared?even
their
like
with
mutually
understanding
anything
Deconstruction
is the secret best friend of ecology.
constitutive?claims.
can seize upon the
in which
is the way
the collective
Deconstruction
is a rigorous thinking of
level. Deconstruction
or "spacing,"
from what Derrida's
and deferment
difference
deriving
of "the
lecture "Structure, Sign, and Play" calls an awareness
seminal
ever
a
were
If
structure
whose
there
structure"
of
(278-80).
structurality
in
of
with
the
tandem
to
be
had
emergence
thought,
begun
structurality
8
and
other
contextualizing
(Of Grammatology
phenomena
cybernetics
the difficulty of thinking
10), itwould be the environment.
Only consider
between weather and climate.
the difference
the climate, and of explaining
is a structure with a specific and highly complex
Climate
structurality,
of
the
which emerged
systems theory. Derrida
early applications
through
as the birth (though whether
this
was already thinking deconstruction
at
of
is
holds
other,
another,
issue)
entirely
precisely
organic metaphor
in their most
radical sense
of animals,
of the nonspecies"?
"species
is
animal
deconstruction.3
the
("Structure" 293). Thinking
political
underlies Western
Derrida
philosophy's
argues that logocentrism
an
in
form. This essay holds that
to
essential
attempt
ground meaning
environment
on the micro
SubStance
#117,
Vol.
37, no.
3, 2008
Unworking
Ecologocentrism:
Animals
75
preventing
philosophy,
ecologocentrism underpins most environmentalist
even
access
to the full scope
of interconnectedness.
Thinking,
as
a
sets
in
the
environmentalist
reified thing
up "Nature"
thinking,
"over yonder," under the sidewalk, on the other side where
the
distance,
in
in
is always
wild.
the
the
mountains,
grass
greener,
preferably
"Nature"
accords
function
about the aura: it is a

Benjamin's
proposition
an
uses
from
"Nature"?or
from
Benjamin
image
But that ismy (and his) point?to
the aura:
describe
with
of distance.
the picturesque?
...
as the
of a distance,
unique
phenomenon
on a summer
be. If, while
[the object] may
resting
a mountain
follow with
afternoon,
eyes
you
your
range on the
or a branch which
casts its shadowr over you, you experience
horizon
the aura of those mountains,
of that branch.
(222-3)
We
the aura
define
how7ever
close
Since we
are not living in the mountains,

in them by day-to
distracted
can be
we
as we can by an
tasks,
them,
day
aesthetically
captivated
by
auratic work of art.
it approaches
When
fullness, ecological
thinking does not allow this
to congeal. Thinking genuine
kind of distance
involves
interdependence
the barrier between
"over here" and "over there," and more
dissolving
the illusory boundary
between
inside and outside, which
is the founding metaphysical
("Violence and
opposition
means
can
no
This
that
151-2).
society
Metaphysics,"
longer be defined
as purely human.
involves
Thinking
interdependence
thinking differ ance:
the fact that all beings, not just symbolic ones, are related to each other
fundamentally,
asserts
Derrida
in an open system without

and differentially,
center or edge.
the image of Indra's net, used in Buddhist
scripture to describe
the interrelationship
between
things:
negatively
Consider
in this infinite net hangs a magnificently

every connection
polished
faceted
in each of its facets all the
reflects
infinitely
jewel, which
facets of every other
jewel in the net. Since the net itself, the number
of jewels, and the facets of everv
the number
of
jewel are infinite,
as well.
reflections
is infinite
174-5)
(Mingyur
At
and
A cursory
shows that life forms are no less intricately,

reading of Darwin
and
interrelated.4
intimately,
infinitely
In this essay, we shall slide from human
to nonhuman
being
how these neighbors
confront us with the trauma
"animals," discovering
of infinite responsibility
code of ethics such as
prior to any specific
"animal rights." We shall then slide from the animal to the vegetative,
as
we recognize
in the "idiotic" livingness
an
of life forms
"a
a-rational,
cephalic" core. And insofar as animals raise the specter of consciousness,
we shall be
realm?to
the possibility
that sentience
sliding to the mineral
can be embodied
in silicon,
for example
of artificial
(the question
SubStance
#117,
Vol.
37, no.
3, 2008
76 Timothy Morton
In a way,
in
this essay mimics
the history of evolution,
intelligence).
it is necessary
which
to imagine a strange "pre-living
life" consisting
of
to self-replicating
RNA replicators
attached
silicate crystals
(Dawkins
in
To
animal
is
to
"unwork"
the
slide
this way.
582-94).
we
to the
from ethical
responsibility
sliding
of
issue
The
of
the
animal
question
psychoanalytic
enjoyment.
political
we go to the
demands
that once we start demolishing
ecologocentrism,
end. My essay thus jettisons the usual phenomenological
to
approach
nonhuman
beings with its too easy talk of "worlds," and instead opts for
a
mix of Lacan and Derrida. Curiously,
this
unsentimental
disturbingly
mix allows for a greater intimacy with nonhuman
the
normal
than
beings
lubricants such as Heideggerian
mysticism,
ideological
phenomenological
Likewise,
shall
be
of embodiment
a rich,
slip
to
prevent
paradoxically
and embeddedness,
and Gaian holism. These
us and other beings,
film between
luscious
us from articulating
a theory of our coexistence
to
with them. Finally, this means
that we shall slide from the ontological
to
to
is
its
to
address the political animal
shake ontology
the ontic. Truly
a
It is only thus that we shall be able to articulate
very foundations.
ecology.
properly materialist
languages
lubricants
in the Open
Strange Strangers: Animals
The category "animal" is among the ways
the ecological.
Ecology without Nature
implies
in which
thinking reifies
a nonconceptual
network
resembles
the
and diversity.
This network
proliferation
of
form
social
that
of
community
"unworking"
Nancy's
philosophy
of the Romantic
from Blanchot's understanding
fragment poem:
develops
it offers not a total "work" of art, but a desoeuvrement.5 The
the way
network. Nor is
is not at the center of this almost unthinkable
"human"
of
infinite
there
"nature," nor indeed the "animal." For at each node of the network,
is a radical gap. Our encounter with the network at any point is with an
irreducible
alterity.
in the language
of the gap is perhaps best described
experience
are
inwhich other people directly
of Emmanuel
Levinas,
infinity. Levinas
the "self" is always
social view in which
strives towards a profoundly
encounter with an "other."
already caught in a traumatic asymmetrical
network:
the
This other is what appears at each node of the ecological
Our
the arrivant, the utterly unexpected

terminology
stranger, or inDerridean
an infinitely open hospitality
must
be
whom
there
towards
arrival,
(or
I use the word
in
Derrida's
reworking).
extraordinary
"hostipitality,"
the radically unknowable
rather than "other" to emphasize
"stranger"
quality
of this arrivant.
SubStance
#117,
Vol.
37, no.
3, 2008
Unworking
Ecologocentrism:
77
Animals
is an endless network of strange strangeness:

Ecology without Nature
the strangeness
of the strangers is irreducible. We cannot predict exactly
are a "who" or a "what."
who or what
whether
they are?indeed,
they
means
to non-identity
radical
This
of
that questions
openness
so
are
are
and
untenable.
But
anthropocentrism
anthropomorphism
or "biophilia."
of "ecologocentrism"
differences
questions
Preserving
between
humans
and animals has well documented
disastrous
effects
on
culture
and
But
differences
erasing
philosophy,
politics.
disastrously
the profound
alterity of the strange
collapses
stranger. To preserve
we must
do away with
and
strange
strangers,
anthropocentrism
a
in
ecologocentrism
single stroke.
This essay's
view of nonhumans
and humans
is not far from
traditional animism.
Because of the nonessentialism
of ecology without
Nature, we must put this term under erasure (animism). Like animism,
regards all beings as people, while not restricting
ecology without Nature
the idea of "people" to human being as such. There is no Nature,
only
some of whom
are human
people,
beings. On this view, there is no such
Instead, there is
thing as "the animal" and no such beings as "animals."
I am always already in a social
to
any specific concept of social
prior
in
to
fact,
any ontology. Thus it is not that animals are
formation?prior,
we say they are?a
whatever
form of nominalism.
We are dealing here
with uniqueness,
with singularity. The "The" in "The Political Animal"
a marker
becomes
of unicity, not generality. Curiously,
is a
this unicity
to imagine collectivity
better way of beginning
because
(not community),
animism undermines
the idea of "person" itself. Let us find out how.
this cat, that tree, this nematode
with
these people,
relationship
In her poem
animal
"presence"
Come
into Animal
"Come
as
worm.
space
one
Presence,"
Denise
Levertov
figures
enters:
into animal
presence
as
is so guileless
The
lonely white
serpent.
No man
the
rabbit
on
twitching
The llama
the roof
its ears
is a star
at the rain.
intricately
its hind
folding
legs to be seated
not disdains
but mildly
human
disregards
approval.
What
the insouciant
joy when
at us and doesn't
armadillo
glances
his
quicken
trotting
across
SubStance
#117,
the
Vol.
track
into
37, no.
the palm
brush.
3, 2008
78 Timothy Morton
is this joy? That no animal

itmust do?
but knows what
What
falters,
That
the snake
that
the rabbit
in white
has no blemish,
inspects his strange

star-silence?
The llama
surroundings
rests
in dignity,
the armadillo
some intention
to pursue
in the palm-forest.
Those who were
sacred have
remained
so,
has
holiness
of bronze,
faltered
An
old
does
not
dissolve,
only the sight that

and turned from it.
joy returns
in holy
it is a presence
saw it
presence.6
to "the animal" in
the sense of this animal as opposed
achieves
as
"animal
and
of
the
notion
reappears
yet
presence,"
general,
general
a
not
is
This
the "holiness"
that is "a presence
/ of bronze"
(22-3).
an organic, close-knit
are
sense
in
of
Nor
the
the
fellowship.
community
There is an implied habitat, a high desert
animals
the kin of humans.
that each animal is there to
the possibility
plateau perhaps. This hinders
for the human gaze, in a neoclassical
something
particular
exemplify
the Rilkean
idea that animals are
allegorical
style. The poem broaches
an
access
in
to
to
human
which
their
eyes are temporarily
unique
"open"
itself
of bronze"
closed. What we turn from is "a presence
(23). Holiness
is an opacity, not a transparency
but an aesthetic density
material,
(of
our view. We shall revisit this notion of ontic,
that impedes
bronze)
at the
rather than ontological,
holiness,
"worldly" holiness,
phenomenal
animal.
with
the
this
level
of
essay's engagement
political
deepest
of animal
this community
The Open explores
Giorgio Agamben's
un working
notion of the aesthetic, which he articulates
via a transformed
as "profound
the post-coital
boredom"
(63-70). Agamben
interprets
a
as representative
of "the inactivity
languor of lovers in Titian painting
... and desoeuvrement of the human and of the animal as the supreme and
Levertov
a sociality prior to
figure of life" (87). Desoeuvrement models
is an open
its
because
human-nonhuman
any
fragmentariness
split,
in this "a
it. Agamben
discerns
lies around
form that includes what
unsavable
than both
(87)?higher
higher stage beyond both nature and knowledge"
is not yet
of
bronze"
human and animal being. The "presence
(Levertov)
a
of the
a reified object, but
that resists the auratic distance
materiality
in
animal. Like a lump of metal
the unworking
artwork. It is "unwork,"
an art gallery, we wonder
unworks
Agamben
consciousness
where
to boredom.
stops and the boundary begins.

from self
into the animal, moving
the work
the human
But might
desoeuvrement,
SubStance
#117,
unworking,
Vol.
go the
37, no.
3, 2008
Unworking
Ecologocentrism:
other
around?
way
distinctively
this feature
human
Might
be found
Animals
79
a feature
of human
at the animal
considered
being
level? Dare we claim that
the capacity for

capacity to reflect, in particular
It is a profound
the aesthetic
question, because
is the very
aesthetic contemplation?
is not simply an intentional consciousness
(consciousness
of...). It shows
us sheer awareness
as such. Kantian beauty is not so much
in the eye of
as it is
the beholder
the
of
the
onto the
beholder,
eye
directly
projected
an
even
The
aesthetic
rather
open,
object.
passive
implies
receptivity,
than activity.
It is fundamentally
non-utilitarian:
nonhuman
life is not
a
so
A
telos
and
(survival, adaptation,
on).
simply fulfilling
good reading
of Darwin
includes his intuition that life forms are not purely utilitarian,
for instance in the case of sexual selection (Morton, The Ecological Thought).
The question
is significant
for the politics of animality.
ecocentric
alike perform
what
Anthropocentric
ideologies
and Danta describe as "the gesture of aligning politics with
Vardoulakis
the rational and the reflexive?a
cornerstone
of humanism?[that]
also
leads to a disturbing
between
the
active
'human'
(or legislative)
separation
"
and the passive
to this issue). We
'animal'
(or collective)
(introduction
in
this
"mild
the
of
Levertov's
llama?
(6-9)
glimpse
perhaps
disregard"
a
llama
out
intended?
Is
this
lama?
be
This
borne
"The
llama
pun
may
by
in
as
rests
were
if
she
One of the deepest
/
(18-19),
dignity"
meditating.
of aesthetics
and
is not, "Can animals

think?" but "Are animals
questions
capable of
mean
aesthetic contemplation?"
was
This
would
the
that
aesthetic
Why?
not a "high" function of "greater" cognitive powers, but a "low" (who
if the aesthetic were
the lowest) one. What
the default
knows, perhaps
as such? Humanists
mode
of sentience
must
at least ask the question.
Perhaps we should be in the business not simply of reacting to science,
but of proposing
scientific experiments.
A threshold
not only resist
that resisted the separation of human and animal would

their collapse
into each other. It would
also resist the
that
all
too
the nonhuman.
It is
"posthumanism"
readily dematerializes
a
that alongside
action on global warming
necessary
paradox
political
and animal rights, a more
trenchant ecological
in philosophy
approach
and culture would
on this threshold,
hesitate
at the very
precisely
moment
at which
the world
is telling us to stop
and do
hesitating
a
To
do
is
definition
both
of
something.
nothing,
intelligently,
good
"animal" passivity
and of aesthetic contemplation,
and even of religious
forms of contemplation
found for instance in apophatic
and
Christianity
in Buddhism.
the political urgency
is
about
Strangely,
today
becoming
animal in this sense. Far from transcending
animality,
theory can think
SubStance
#117,
Vol.
37,
no.
3, 2008
80 Timothy Morton
as becoming
lines
animal.7 Along
has
established
Buddhism
contemporary
itself
to Agamben's,
similar
the connection
between
angst and meditative

insight (Trungpa, 56-7).
a Deleuzo-Guattarian
not
"line of flight"
animal"
is
"becoming
a radical deconstruction
of that
but
from the normative
political
sphere,
too
what
towards
flies
The
Deleuzo-Guattarian
hastily
approach
sphere.8
out
The
of
turn
to
be
thinking
may
political urgency
ideological mirages.
of the
not least because
to its difficulty,
is proportionate
animals
a
in
of everything
hypercapitalist,
increasingly
fungible
quality
?in which
and genomics
age of bioengineering
nanotechnological
existential
boredom,
This
else. This
might be capable of being liquefied into everything
of
domination
towards
the
the
total
increases
fungibility
compulsion
are in danger of providing
and transhumanism
life forms. Posthumanism
a
mastery. And there is a
perfect alibi for another round of Nietzschean
everything
to get beyond
the Nietzschean
further difficulty. Any attempt
strategy
since his is the philosophy
risks ending up simply reaffirming Nietzsche,
rather than losers (Bull). An ecological
of winners
surely
approach would
than the superman.
rather
with
the
"subhuman"
identify with the losers,
To think the political animal, then, is to think "lower" and "less than," to
to dig holes
and
in introversion,
in vulnerability
and hide
shrink
view rather than an eagle's. Marx's
hibernate. Theory could be amole's-eye
"Old mole. Canst thou
from Hamlet springs to mind;
favorite quotation
work i' th' earth so fast?" (1.5.183).
This essay now exfoliates
by closely
becoming-animal-theory,
of
a text that is profoundly
with
questions
preoccupied
examining
text
the
This
articulates
and
global
intimacy.
strangers,
interdependence
a radical
awareness
thinking
through
by environmental
promoted
of imagining
that still outruns normative
coexistence
ways
ecological
care. The text is Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris and its film adaptations
by
Andrei
Tarkovsky
and Steven
Soderbergh.
as an Ape: Solaris
surface is a vast ocean that exhibits signs of
Solaris is a planet whose
as if the entire planet were a gigantic brain. Lem's novel was
sentience,
of
formulation
written
about fifteen years earlier than James Lovelock's
similarities with
the sentient ocean has striking
the Gaia hypothesis;
set of feedback
Lovelock's
loops that appear
image of a self-sustaining
Yet there are
like
sentience.
to demonstrate
from a distance
something
is that while Gaia is a
not the least of which
some striking differences,
nonholistic
in an absolutely
holistic
way.
concept, Solaris is portrayed
Planet
SubStance
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Vol.
37, no.
3, 2008
Ecologocentrism:
Unworking
Animals
81
Gaian language portrays

the Earth as telling us that we are harming
a
that communicate
it, through
indirect,
emergent messages?parts
a
more
a
in
as
whole.
far
Solaris communicates
direct way,
singular
to singular beings. Kris Kelvin,
the protagonist,
is a
on
on
a
tests
the
scientists
station
space
psychologist
conducting
orbiting
aware that the planet may be telepathically
aware
Solaris. He becomes
of him. It is precisely
are
because we are not sure whether
animals
or not that we should act ethically with regard to them. The
conscious
about whether
the Gaian ecosystem
is
question
imagined by Lovelock
or
a
is
artificial
thus
to
otherwise,
genuinely
prone
intelligence,
larger,
more deconstructive
ethics in which,
because we will never
precisely
know for sure, we should treat "artificial" beings
(who isn't one?) as if
were
sentient beings.9 The Korean government
released
they
recently
in
for
the
ethical
treatment
of
robots
this
isworth
It
manner.10
guidelines
this
use of
hesitation
reiterating
essay's
concerning
scholarship's
comment
Gandhi's
about
Western
civilization
"posthumanism."
("It
would
an unfinished
be a very good idea") also applies
to humanism,
a not-yet.
Indeed
humanism
the
project.
incorporates
Ideally
encounter
deconstructive
or
between
the human
and the nonhuman
inhuman
is the human
[see Zizek 159-60]).
The question
of an ethical
towards
nonhuman
regard
beings
a
into
set
of
to
artificial
deliquesces
questions
pertaining
intelligence.
Where does one draw the line between personhood
and non-personhood?
Where
does one draw boundaries
of sentience,
if at all? Is intelligence
in any way? 2001 addresses
embodied
the question
from the point of
view of multiple
9000
is
made
components?HAL
up of them?while
Solaris tackles the theme from the point of view of the whole,
imagining
as a colossal brain.
the biosphere
Solaris by no
however,
Fascinatingly,
means
in the story is an
suggests holism as a solution. Every encounter
encounter with a singular being. The planet is
not a mystical
precisely
web of life, greater than the sum of its parts, but a vulnerable,
unique
existence Kris is directly responsible.
being for whose
Solaris vividly poses the Levinasian
as the way in
notion of otherness
which
the stranger always already subtends me,
the planet
by imagining
as a
brain
that
sends
out
in the
embodied
giant
impossible-real
thoughts
form of people. These incarnations are derived from the scanned memories
of the scientists aboard the space station. Solaris holds up the mirror
to
the souls of the inhabitants
of the scientists.
The Doppelganger-like
are themselves
"simulacra"
illusion
only dimly aware of their uncanny
like status (65). Kris's
with
Solaris
becomes
his
relationship
rapidly
being
SubStance
speaking
#117,
Vol.
37, no.
3, 2008
82 Timothy Morton
with his ex-lover Rheya, who committed

suicide and now
relationship
returns to haunt him in the flesh, as ametastasized
version of the planet
a
Solaris's drive to communicate,
superbly realized image of the Lacanian
sinthome, the inconsistent-impossible-real
sprout of enjoyment.
In Andrei
1972 film adaptation,

Snaut
calls this
Tarkovsky's
"the materialization
of [Kris's] conception
of her." Sartorius
A copy. A matrix." Yet the people
calls her "Amechanical
reproduction.
are
no
as Kris finds out
whom
Solaris materializes
hallucinations,
quickly
a
in Cartesian
to prove his sanity. They begin as all too real
experiment
sprouts of liquid imagery on the surface of the sentient ocean. Because
simulacrum
of her status as an embodiment

to come to terms with her alien
she is unaware
herself
has
of this liquid being, Rheya

the story a
identity, giving
theme of discovering
the alien within
a
the profound
lesson of Darwinism,
Blade Runner-like
Frankensteinian,
is surely
oneself. This discovery
of
theory
mutagenic
replicants whom
can only tentatively call species.

with his ex-lover Rheya (or
Lurking
in Tarkovsky's
Hari
life-substance,
film) is the existential
meaningless
in
his
she emits
Kris
locks
Hari
of
ideation
material.
When
room,
spurts
at the back of Kris's
we
encounter
sounds and claws open the metal door. He tries to kill her by
her out into space, but she returns, a Xerox of his memory.
sending
she
when
she drinks
indestructible,
liquid oxygen,
Disturbingly
a text, information
in
written
is
revives.
She
literally
spontaneously
see
a
is
We
the
and
like
she
material
text,
flesh,
utterly reproducible.
she springs. The sprouts of the ocean mind's
living inkwell from which
are called mimoids:
the planet is amimic?a
parrot, or an ape
enjoyment
are
Mimoids
thus
(OED, "ape," n.l, 3).
"apings" or
simple reflections,
our
or
a
a
is he, or
computer
parrot
copies
language,
"parrotings." When
like us? Is it behaving
she, or it, behaving
consciously? Are we? The trouble
of us reflects back on us,
is that their apparent mimicry
with animals
our own behavior
us wonder whether
is unique or deep.
making
is
simulacra
like reading text while
mimoids
and
the
the
Watching
terrible
on
it being written
watching
simultaneously
a
author.
without
itself, automatically,
separate
the "book of Nature." We see the "genotext"
at the same time
the "phenotext"
(simulacra)
a special page that writes

This is a radical image of
and
(the spurting matter)
(Kristeva 89-136). Or?to
see
into the language of biology?we
language back
and the phenotype
(what this material
(genetic material)
once.
at
It is as if we were
to
enzymes
organisms)
"expresses"?from
were
onto
which
layers of
superimposed
replication,
watching
information. Of course, this is what actually does occur at the genomic
translate
Kristeva's
the genotype
SubStance
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Unworking
Ecologocentrism:
Animals
83
and
between
hardware
level. Given
such a harrowing
proximity
sentient being, can we call
and apparently
software, between mimoid
a person or even a
this is animality up close: DNA,
Rheya
subject? Again,
can
and
both as hardware
RNA, and enzymes
operate
simultaneously
as software. The symbolic
in the
language of "life" is encoded
directly
a rhetorical
or
term
need
like "anti-anamorphosis"
real. We
a kind of metalepsis
or "un-metaphor,"
to evoke the
"dedeformation,"
turns into
twist in which what
is ambient
and environmental
double
what
is frontal
and
singular.
his fantasy
tried to destroy or
projection.
Having
of
Kris
to
decides
relate
with her precisely
ignore
Rheya,
as a
from
is about learning
Solaris.
Kris's
ethical
dilemma
living message
to treat the replica of his ex-lover as a unique person who just happens
to
woman
of the
and characteristics
from his past?
possess all the memories
a person who
In joining Rheya,
is also an interface for the planet-brain.
an
Kris performs
identification
with the planet
(inhuman?)
impossible
as
a radical acceptance
one
via
of
of
the
endless
real,
ecological
potentially
in the horrifying,
series of Rheya-replicas.
This is beautifully
embodied
Kris
transcends
the simulacrum
film interpretation.
neo-Christian
Tarkovsky
the planet to be a metaphor
for the encounter
with the really other other in the form of God. But as the imagery makes
explicit, this encounter
(staged as the meeting between Kris and his father)
a
on
takes place
little island of symbolic
(and only just: it's
consistency
a
ocean
in
a
of
Kris has made
indoors)
raining
psychotic
unmeaning.
surreal end of Tarkovsky's
the encounter with
wants
drastic choice to stay on the space station and be drawn down onto the
sentient planet by the attractive force of its gravitational
field (Newtonian
of
God's
The
in the
detects
"islands
of
love).
symbol
planet
memory"
and simulates
them in the external world.
The conclusion
astronauts,
materializes
this when Kris himself
inhabits a literal island of memory
his father, kneeling
to him on the threshold of their forest home.
Kris knows very well that Rheya/Hari
is not his lover, and so he knows
as much as we the audience know about the final shot. In an
extraordinary
as ethical), Kris is
ethical perversion
aware
that his
(perversion
fully
is a simulation.
Lebenswelt
a
Kris exists without
Nature,
yet with
ethics.
profoundly
ecological
The simulacra are metaleptic
embodiments
of the filmic surface itself,
the actual "environment"
inwhich
As
well as being uncanny
they appear.
are
also
idiomatic
idiotic,
Doppelgangers,
they
sprouts of planet stuff.
These beings are neighbors
par excellence,
strangers whose
strangeness
is irreducible. The simulacra
show us what
ismost
traumatic about so
with
SubStance
#117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008
84 Timothy Morton
animals. As Lacan says of alterity, "what constitutes

is
pretence
it's a pretence or not. Essentially
that, in the end, you don't know whether
in the alterity of the other which
it is the unknown
element
characterizes
it is spoken to the other" (48).
the speech relation on the level on which
... as the
And as Slavoj Zizek explains,
"The neighbor
that,
Thing means
as my semblant, my mirror
beneath
the neighbor
image, there always
of radical Otherness,
of amonstrous
lurks the unfathomable
abyss
Thing
"
that cannot be 'gentrified'
(Zizek 143). If animals are people, according
called
to our hypothetical
animist view, they are neighbors.
Ethics is grounded
are
or
"for
real"
and in glimpsing
both on not knowing whether
not,
they
an abyssal Real beneath
the simulative
surface. The question
of the
is inextricable
from the problem of the political animal. Treating
political
as people
is a political
choice that faces the vulnerability
nonhumans
in which we are entangled.
and responsibility
towards other beings
to Vegetable
From Animal
causes the forest and the trees, depersonalization

Solaris brilliantly
to overlap.
towards
like what
the personal,
It works
something
is not
notion
of
that
Vardoulakis
calls
"a
difference
Dimitris
subjective
and
(104). This view

imagines
subjective
identity"
a passage
in
of
what
Zizek
of
the
lines
says
Hegel,
along
relationships
to accord with
view of Hegel's
that alters the normative
intersubjectivity
if
a notion
the Hegelian
"What
of non-identitarian
subjectivity:
by
underpinned
means
in the impenetrable
Other
that I have to recognize
'recognition'
as
its
of
freedom
the
obstacle
which
my
appears
positive-enabling
thus becomes
hesitation
(Zizek 142). Ontological
ground and condition?"
which
forms the basis for an ethics
the essence of aesthetic contemplation,
of non-violence.
that this subjective difference

assert, moreover,
implies
that is irreducibly,
that is not a "world," that is not home,
somewhere
(Unheimlich) home is
uncannily
homely and alien. This alien "unhomely"
an
as a total system bounded
to
think
by
ecologocentrically
impossible
One
should
Nature.
is ecology without
Ontological
reason why
aesthetic
contemplation
profound
can
If nonhumans
life forms.
be the key to understanding
may
with
we
are
with
animals,
thus,
"unworking"
truly dealing
contemplate
us to theory, but are
as those beings who not only provoke
animals
for not
to praise animals
is incorrect
theory directly. Thus Levertov
[they] must do" (14-15).
"faltering" and "know[ing] what
in" in
of the planet turns itself "outside
In Solaris, the environment
The simulations
the astronauts.
intimate contact with
order to make
The
outside.
hesitation
home-as-alien
is the most
SubStance
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Vol.
37, no.
3, 2008
Unworking
Ecologocentrism:
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beings
Animals
85
the truism that all sentient

truths within
the phantasmatic
The
their environments.
and are made
of
constitute
up
both
problem
with
problem
evolution
makes
life forms
of not
life forms. The
in part
is always
we
with whom
of semblance,
problem
are dealing.
The theory
knowing
this utterly explicit: every life form ismade
simulacra are both too unreal, and too real.
of
up of other
real
like this encounter with the environmental
There is something
on
in
in Freud's
which
environmental
the
uncanny,
essay
tropes
sometimes
stand in for the encounter with the traumatic kernel of other
of people. Forests are iterations of trees, and so
people and the otherness
we will
one
in a forest in high altitudes,
is
lost
"when
uncanny:
caught,
to find the
and when
mist,
every endeavor
suppose,
by the mountain
or familiar path ends again and again in a return to one and the
marked
some particular
same spot, recognizable
landmark"
(Freud 17.237).n
by
iswhy we say, "he
which
of
the
The forest is a quintessential
text,
image
forests
can't see the forest for the trees." We are always trying to make
so-called environmentalism
The scandal of Wordsworth's
it as a perverse,
is that at crucial moments
he expresses
singular love for
a
a unique
tree
is
of many,
one"
of
"There
("Intimations
thing:
this does not mean
that there is
52). If there is no Nature,
Immortality,"
here, but with an
nothing. We are not dealing with sheer nominalism
is also an image of collectivity.
ethics of singularity. Yet the forest-as-text
as
The dialectic of strange strangeness
compels us to see "animals" both
a
as
and
of
non-holistic
collective.
unique
part
which
is
Solaris's simulacra are called Phi-Creatures,
for a Lacanian
into wholes.
almost too perfect. Phi (O) is Lacan's symbol for the "imaginary Real."
The "negress" Phi-Creature
(30) is the imaginary Real of racist enjoyment
reaction
is
What
from the sentient ocean are
horror).
(Kris's
emerges
excess
of
embodiments
whose
the
enjoyment
pathetic
parodies
stature
frames in which
appear. The gigantic
ideological
they normally
is overwhelming,
of the negress
like Frankenstein's
creature, parodically
the onlooker with her or his own racist desire, through the
threatening
the textual overdoing
of something,
the sprouting
trope of hyperbole:
forth of something
extra. The sprout of enjoyment
persists, zombie-like,
even after the
a "primitive negress"
it
is
that
framed
useless?like
ideology
a
on
around
The
is the a-rational,
walking
sprout
spaceship.
core
and
inconsistent
of ideological
nonconceptual
fantasy, and as such
a
it provides
the fantasy. When
found walking
around
way of dissolving
the space station, outside their ideological
frames, the Phi-Creatures
put
to shame: "Shame, the feeling that will save humanity"
the scientists
(Kris, in Tarkovsky's
SubStance
#117,
Vol.
Solaris).
37, no.
Shame,
the awareness
that I am caught
3, 2008
in
86 Timothy Morton
the gaze of the other, is always the "animal

inwhich one finds
presence"
oneself.
here with Levertov, who suggests
that we can
(I part company
"Come into" this "presence.")
Should we then suggest
I see an animal,
that when
I am always
from my
inner space, scuttling
around
something
disturbing
of me? I am ashamed precisely because
"it isme" more directly
am.
than Imyself
this is the basis
for the social practice
of
Surely
the
an
shame
of
the
onto
scapegoating:
literally loading
community
animal and sending her or him out into the wilderness.
Every attempt to
get rid of this disturbing
"abject" thus directly wounds me and disturbs
even more
the social
thus readying
the closed
space,
profoundly
seeing
outside
for another
round of scapegoating.
This is precisely why
community
as humans with
animals cannot just be accepted
fur and feathers into
the human "community,"
because accepting
animals implies dissolving
as such that
the holistic notion of community
always serves as a screen
to prevent me from witnessing
inextricable
my
intimacy with other
beings.
?
this disturbing
of human
this maximal
Against
beingness
externalized
to formulate Cartesian
eccentricity?Kris
attempts
sanity
in a closed loop (I know I am sane because
I can prove that something
this must be done with
the help of a giant
exists, 50). Unfortunately
a
The
machine
is
externalization
of the res
computer.
thinking
prosthetic
intellectus. Because
the "something
that exists" is the computer whose
"brain" sticks out like a sore thumb, the experiment
itself deconstructs
existence
into ex-sistence
outside of oneself"). The
(literally, "placement
form
of
Kris's
makes
clear
that
very
experiment
personal
identity always
substance
that undermines
depends upon some external, supplementary
was half conscious
its identitarian
claims. That Descartes
of this is
we
confirmed
of "res"?what
and above
find beyond
by his parapraxis
matter
are emanations
is a thing that thinks. Likewise,
the Phi-Creatures
of the ultimate
Human
wetware,
being
the brain-ocean.
into "animal
collapses
into writhing,
vegetative
and "animal
presence,"
life. Tarkovsky
decided
to
presence"
collapses
the fecund, wet, birdsung
ambience
of a rural
begin with Kris amidst
Russian upper middle
class. Looking
into a stream, Kris Kelvin sees what
could be reflections of amass of undulating
fronds?a
figure both for the
a reflection, perhaps
(we are seeing a water
Imaginary
image, possibly
in the
distorted by the flow of water) and for the Real (we are beholding,
of the flow of water
rippling
anamorphosis
The
fronds
enjoyment).
wonderfully
encapsulate
SubStance
of
itself, the sprouts
the mimoids
of Solaris?
#117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008
Unworking
Ecologocentrism:
Animals
87
at the back of the animal.12

the vegetable
and vegetative
lurking
is done to
Kubrick's
with
2001, where
everything
Stanley
Compared
erase the
from the text, Tarkovsky's
Solaris contains
body's specificity
much
meaningless
the familiar old
sweatiness
of Kris,
pungent
farmhouse
(that frame the
mind-ocean
that sends out sprouts
the almost
physicality:
routines
of a run-down
technology
ironically), the morphing
The closest Dave (2001) comes is to the view outside the
of enjoyment...
and surfaces
and
of
mucus-like
colors
the
space pod
expanding
ocean
to
sentient
the
and
decides
live
the
Kelvin
embraces
contracting.
rest of his life in contact with it.He plants himself in the phenomenal
(not
even phenomenological)
world:
the ontic "sacred" (that is, disturbingly
is for someone.
world
It is this
world.
The
intimate)
phenomenological
world does not permit.
"someone"
that the phenomenal
A conservative
to stay
that at the end Kris decides
suggests
reading
a transcendent
or
on the planet
to be reunited with
father?an
god
of mind. But amore radical reading suggests
that Kris's own
a
a
consciousness
child
(as
upon
parent) upon, literally "hangs
depends
at the
off" or "grows from" the undulating
fronds that he contemplates
to
returns
film
at
of
the
and
which
he
the
end.
The
fronds
also
beginning
abstraction
film stock
the undead, vegetative
bring tomind
quality of the palpitating
In
it life?
and its uneasy equation with palpitating
life?is
this sense, the
amechanized,
film itself is a Phi-Creature,
robotic simulation of sentient
we face the uncertainty
as to whether
all sentient being is
being?again,
this robotic
simulation.
It gradually
becomes
enjoyment
as
part
of
clear
a seduction?an
that
the ocean
intimate
is offering
communication,
sprouts
of
a caress.
A caress of shame! Indeed, the planet insists upon communication.

The
astronauts
attack and abandon
their Phi-Creatures,
but this
kill, maim,
does not prevent
the sentient sea from sending out more. To accept that
is to transcend
the projection
of imaginary
identities onto the mimoids.
us how
to love beyond
and
identity. Both Tarkovsky's
films imply this, in the former case with the gigantic panning
Soderbergh's
shot that includes
the island of father and son in the psychotic
ocean,
and in the latter with the divine glide into seeming utter madness.
In an
on
case
twist
in
the
each
the
illusion
noir,
film
ecological
protagonist
accepts
of the Phi-Creature,
that it is an illusion, as a way to join with
knowing
ocean
the sentient
itself. Kris radically
whose
Sartorius,
opposes
in
contrast
to
stand
his
collaboration
with
the
illusion.
Kris
experiments
sends an "encephalogram"
a
to the planet, an X-ray modulated
brain
by
wave
that includes the totality of his mind,
conscious
(155-6), amessage
Solaris
SubStance
shows
#117,
Vol.
37, no.
3, 2008
88 Timothy Morton
and thus includes content of which he cannot be aware.

and unconscious,
in the alterity of the other"
To quote Lacan again, "the unknown
element
of the speaker herself or himself.
(48) also applies to the communication
one
sense more
in
is
version
than
Soderbergh's
disturbing
ocean
a
sentient
is
because
instead
of
the
for
God,
Tarkovsky's,
metaphor
consumerism.
version
is
the
nihilist
Soderbergh's
just as
misreading,
a
is
Kris
the
theistic
becomes
Tarkovsky's
misreading.
solipsistic
consumerist
who gets sucked into the vortex of narcissistic
enjoyment.
At the end we are told that all has been forgiven. Kris gets to have his
cake and eat it too by joining with
the planet and possessing
Rheya all
over
again, now capable of acting as if the suicide had never happened.

In Tarkovsky Kris notices that it is raining indoors, a poetic inversion.
In
a self-inflicted
we saw earlier in
on
cut
Kris's
which
hand,
Soderbergh
the film, heals itself, indicating
that he is fully in the world of the planet
it at all (has he just been
not communicating
with
Solaris?while
renders Kris's encounter with the real of the

downloaded?).
Soderbergh
a
in
noise engulfs
the ship,
scene, where white
planet
penultimate
score.
But
this
the
Ligeti-esque
penultimate
temporarily
overwhelming
ness suggests an ability to live through the psychotic
encounter with the
that is denied, or is at any rate
real and achieve a minimal
consistency
far more
in
precarious,
Tarkovsky's
version.
here of the
further elaboration
Space
permit
and
theistic
nihilistic-consumerist
between
the
occluded
correspondence
is
versions
of Solaris, but there surely is one, since nihilism
Christian
one?
more
an
a
of
albeit
form
belief,
ostensibly
sophisticated
simply
limitations
do not
in which
in nothing."
Both film versions
play with the way
"believing
as
in his work on capitalism
what Benjamin,
Kris radically dissolves
time
of
timeless
calls
the
which,
guilt?in
religion,
"guilt history"?the
in a dualistic
on this essay's terms, the subject is suspended
relationship
to a consumerist
to belong
its object, whether
the object appears
with
Kantian browsing without
(the free fall of window
shopping,
or to a theistic one (the
zero
as
of
the
consumerism),
purpose,
degree
the subject
and
endless
of
retribution).13 Collapsing
guilt
relationship
a world where
mean
all is either
into
not
dualism
does
entering
object
means
traumatic
or
into
the
God.
It
brain
entering
firings
just
just
manner
in
a
which
both
the
Thus
with
encounter
strange
stranger.
scientists
takes
the
of
the
of the story resolve the deadlock
adaptations
universe
form of a radical
and,
or
We
historical
as,
coexistence
with
the stranger,
short-circuiting
religion
capitalism.
thus return
significance.
to the theme
How
does
of the political
animal, and its world
this politics of the
Solaris thematize
SubStance
#117,
Vol.
37, no.
3, 2008
Unworking
Ecologocentrism:
Animals
89
the image
film, the zero gravity scene prefigures
on the
floating
psychedelically
swirling, mimetic
ocean. Here the camera floats around the bounded
horizon of a Brueghel
painting of a feudal village in a snowy forest clearing, an invocation of a
Lebenswelt made
strange by the floating point of view. The planet's
animal? In Tarkovsky's
of Kris's home island
field is such that the space station temporarily

loses its
gravitational
artificial gravity, so the floating camera angle literally floats Brueghel's
ocean. We are drawn into a cinematic world
in a wider, displacing
world
inwhich form enacts content. The images of and metaphors
for the planet
ocean have an analogue
in the imagery of fronds in flowing water
that
recurs once
at the beginning
of the film and once before the concluding
of the water, with
shot. The fluid motion
and
floating detritus?living
an
for
dead?is
the
filmic
surface
itself.
analogue
Thus the closest the spectator comes to the encounter with the really
other other is in our encounter with the mute, metamorphic
surface of
the film stock, as in Stan Brakhage's experiments
such as Dog StarMan, in
which he worked
directly on the film stock itself. In 2001, the monolith
stands in for the dark letterbox shape of the blank screen, a space into
which
shoot
ape creatures and humans project desire, and from which
beams of technical knowledge,
them in a horrifying
immersing
high
scream
of
white
noise?does
this
noise
not
pitched
strangely prefigure
the sound of a dialup modem
to a server? In the final sequence
connecting
a screen within
a screen, out of which
of 2001 the monolith
becomes
not
wet
fronds
but
of light:
beams
emerge
undulating
spectacular
fast, "wowing" Dave
frightening,
him to cosmic rebirth. By contrast,
and us with
Kris washes
which
a lightshow,
yet leading
his hands in the water in
him and us to a world
that
the fronds slowly undulate,

returning
he and we know is an illusion. As in Brakhage's experiments,
the filmic
surface is already populated with an other, with being as otherness.
In answer
to Kubrick's
of the cinema screen as void,
presentation
us
as
screen
the
not as full presence.
fullness?but
In his
Tarkovsky
gives
later film Stalker, the screen is filled with garbage,
the detritus of human
in The Zone.
desire, as the camera tracks across the surface of the water
In Solaris the film stock becomes
Zizek
expresses
it eloquently
the (other) planet, the environment

in a passage on Stalker:
in our
standard
to
the approach
is
tradition,
ideological
Spirit
as Elevation,
as
rid of the burden
of weight,
of the
getting
force which
binds us to earth, as cutting
links with material
gravitating
in contrast
inertia and starting
to "float freely";
to this, in Tarkovsky's
perceived
universe,
physical
SubStance
#117,
we
enter
contact
Vol.
with
37, no.
the
spiritual
the humid
dimension
heaviness
direct
only via intense
of earth (or stale wTater) ?
3, 2008
itself.
90 Timothy Morton
a
the ultimate
Tarkovskian
takes place when
experience
spiritual
out on the earth's surface,
is lying stretched
half submerged
subject
in stale water;
do not pray on their knees, with
heroes
Tarkovsky's
their heads
turned
towards
instead
listen
heaven;
upwards,
they
. .
to
the
silent
of
the
humid
earth.
(Zizek, "The
intensely
palpitation
from Inner Space")
Thing
A materialist
ecology is faced with the choice between Nature and ecology.

can have Nature,
or ecology, but not both. We can have animals, or a
world, but not both. As this essay has argued in various different modes,
We
"Spirit"?self-reflection?must
than on some "elevated"
into the political
realm
than lofty.
be
installed
at the material
level rather
level. Thus "animal passivity" will have entered

is lowly
that self-reflection
through a discovery
rather
is ambient
Solaris
art at its finest?environmental
art without
real of the environment-turned
The encounter with the sentient

the
is staged at the formal level as the aesthetic encounter with
of transmission
itself?the material
density of the film surface.
is to popular music.
films are to cinema what drone music
Tarkovsky's
Nature.14
person
medium
They
Agamben
(aesthetic
The film
God
of boredom
that
the sense of time and use an experience
as the link between what we think of as the fully human
or animal.
and what we think of as nonhuman
contemplation)
tries to achieve an encounter with
itself is animality. Tarkovsky
and in a far more deconstructive
content, but only succeeds,
at the level of form. We should
recall the phrase of George
annihilate
in
manner,
asserts
in the sermon "The

the nineteenth-century
theologian, who
one
intense reality isGod,
declares
that "the
of Mysticism"
Reawakening
to
nearer than breathing,
closer than hands and feet" (106). Kris decides
off
the
rather
than
live in this world of ultimate
shaming
intimacy,
fending
Morrison,
It is as if Kris leaps out of the film's content and into its

to live on the surface of the film stock itself. In this sense he
form, deciding
to living in the traumatic,
traverses the fantasy and commits
impossible
for this
that is the person of Solaris. God is one word
real environment
so is animality.
But
than
"nearer
intimacy,
breathing."
the Earth is the opposite
to this logic, properly
inhabiting
According
and the delusion of the self. And yet, at the same time, it
of self-delusion,
Phi-Creatures.
is a full acceptance
of the phantasmic
with
the
monstrous,
sprouting
coexisting
illusion,
in the radical
form of
by the cinema
thing embodied
screen and its writhing
Solaris
becomes
the limit of
The
form
of
imagery.
a
matter
as
an
of
is
animal
The
the
intimacy
ape.
political
planet
animality:
not of being-one with Nature.
with the neighbor,
the notion of the animal as a being
This raises a question
concerning
a
of what
an
it raises the question
with
person. Furthermore,
identity,
SubStance
#117,
Vol.
37, no.
3, 2008
Ecologocentrism:
counts
rather
Unworking
Animals
91
as a person.
Ifwe
than the weather
idea: that
accept Gaia, why resist the opposite
are
sentient
like the
sentient,
being
beings
If the two terms are indeed related by identity, or even
simply
weather?
is what
the Gaia metaphor
implies?then
surely
is reversible? And if so, where do we draw the line between
the concept
or even between weather
this and that weather,
and non-weather?
We
can tell that Gaia is ideological because
the copula is not reversible: Gaia
is a whole greater than the sum of its parts. A careful reading of Solaris
shows that to enter into relationship with a strange stranger is precisely
not to forge a communion
with a Gaia-like,
holistic entity.
a
nor
a
neither
theistic
outcome
nihilistic
appears possible or
Again,
desirable. The philosopher
that we
claims, "it is doubtful
John McDowell
can conceive of
as
a
like a state of the
occurrence,
thinking
subjectless
resemblance?which
weather"
(McDowell 256). Derek Parfit, whose Reasons and Persons strongly

or
for
the idea that there is no independent,
argues
single
lasting self,
or "no-self" view would
refutes McDowell's
claim that a reductionist
a
entail a process without
subject ("Experiences,
Subjects, and Conceptual
a
view
Such
Schemes").
might
simply require that we expand or limit
our view of what a
is?in
the language of this essay, this is the
subject
encounter with
the strange stranger. Something
like this is required of
Kris in his relationship
with replica-Rheya,
in
is at once a person
who
her own right, and an interface for Solaris itself. Kris has to perform
two
difficult operations:
to recognize
that replica-Rheya
is not Rheya; and to
same
an
at
the
time
not
that
is
she
acknowledge
person, but
independent
an
use
avatar
like
internet
the
of
the
(to
term)
something
planet-mind.
The Cost
of Intimacy
It should by now
entering an age where
obvious
that we are
frighteningly
be one of the most dominant,
if not
our
the dominant,
of
world
and
way
describing
discussing
policy.
in science are helping us understand
Advances
just how enmeshed we
all are in the world. Like that charity song from the 1980s, "We Are The
World" ?and
it doesn't
feel so good.
I know
that my body probably
some mercury
contains
and has been affected by radiation.
I can take
sure. But even without
tests to make
them, there remains a sneaking
that I might be contaminated,
suspicion
just like most of the plants and
animals. And thus, even if by some remote chance I'm not
in
swimming
own
I
then
have
still
been
affected
So
my
poison,
by ecological
thinking.
but not, it turns out, in a nice
yes, we are all interconnected,
Utopian,
hippy manner. We are starting to learn just how interlinked
everything
SubStance
#117,
Vol.
be painfully,
ecology will
37, no.
3, 2008
92 Timothy Morton
is, the hard way. This idea has now lost its charming,
naive 1960s aura.
Such is the effect of risk society (Beck).15
Since the late eighteenth
the
century (the period we call Romantic),
arts and humanities
have held an idea that "nature" is something
(some
this
thing) "over yonder." Science, and current events, have outstripped
idea. How can the arts and humanities
catch up? Unfortunately
for some,
this will mean de-Bambifying
nature: it cannot be just cute any more.
The logic of the movie Happy Feet is that you can
only be nice to one
species at a time: seals look nasty from a penguin's
eye view. A somewhat
be "Dance for us, or we'll keep on
cynical reading might
killing you."
Children
flushed their goldfish
down
toilets when Finding Nemo came
out. Sentimentality
is not working. Nor is the wild energy of the sublime.
For nature to be sublime, we have to be at least a little distant from it. A
toxic leak is not sublime by the time it has entered
the lungs. Global
not
is
more
sublime:
it
is
far
and
than
warming
disorienting,
painful,
that.
This
nor has it
relativism,
essay has not advocated
"postmodern"
that trees and rabbits and coral do not exist. It is
simply that
human beings cannot afford (in all senses) to pursue old-school
thinking
about our coexistence
with all the other beings on this Earth.
Thinking
must
take a step back and rearticulate
"the environment"
at the very
moment
at which
it is flooding
into our homes on the airwaves
and as
the all too real waves
of events such as Hurricane
Katrina. Crises make
us panic, and panic wants us to act, and act fast. We are
going to need to
act and think at the same time, and this praxis is not as easy as
walking
and chewing
Nature
is itself a form of the
without
gum. Ecology
hesitation with which
the political
animal confronts us.
ontological
Nature
does not mean
that it is okay to keep on
Ecology without
for oil rather than exploring
solar and wind
drilling
energy. Entities
such as coral reefs do exist. It is not scholarship
but modern
life that is
sure
to
its
make
best
do
not
exist.
that
While
doing
they really
tackling
with
all deliberate
the near total
global warming
speed and trusting
we should be
scientific
consensus,
using culture not only to create a
in which global warming
framework
science becomes
and
recognizable
in
we
should be slowing down, reflecting, and using
legible. And
general,
as an
this moment
to change and develop.
opportunity
claimed
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels state that under the
economic
"National
and narrow
one-sidedness
conditions,
become more and more impossible,
mindedness
and from the numerous
national and local literatures,
there arises a world
literature" (224-5). If
current
this idea is to mean
more
than people
from several
SubStance
#117,
different
Vol.
countries
37, no.
3, 2008
Ecologocentrism:
Unworking
Animals
93
same ways,
itmust
include the idea that
thing in the
in
certain
under
meditate
can,
circumstances,
upon the
writing
general
as
is not unconnected
to the
such. This capability
idea of world
of
kinds
of
It
becomes
misery.
globalization
specific
eventually
possible
to sing a song called "We Are The World,"
and wince
about it, or to see
the same
writing
the many
levels of painful
Ecology has reminded
the phrase "United Nations."

irony within
us that in fact we are the world,
if only in the
In
historical
material
environmental
terms,
negative.
phenomena
in dialectical
of
participate
interplay insofar as they bring an awareness
as
environmental
such
the
Asian
"brown
negatives
global warming,
cloud" and toxic events such as Chernobyl.
Far from needing
filling out
some
as
or
with
"nature"
the ecofeminist
and
positive
"thing" such
awareness
is just what we need.
image of Gaia, this negative
Lem's Solaris and its film versions
thematize
the drastic, queer
of what has been normatively
and neuteringly
called the love of
Solaris is about getting over our projections,
and yet staying with
Lovelockian
Stanislaw
quality
nature.
I return
to the idea of subjective difference

in
not grounded
never
as
an
of
Indra's
net
is
identity:
metaphor
experienced
a
and singular
encounters
with
integrated whole,
only as traumatic
an
irreducible-real
animal
whose
stranger qua
Thing,
vegetative
being
is not far from the surface. Are we intimate with ghosts or with plants?
In the ecological
society to come, we are going to need more and less than
the planet.
the Buddhist
nature
lovers and tree huggers.

If leftist ecology
is to have an ethics, then it cannot be the fascist one
inwhich we are components
of a greater whole.
Itmust
instead reside in
the singularity
commitment
of, and conscious
to, the other. Such a
cannot be reciprocal,
otherwise we return to the holistic
responsibility
web
of
life. This
is elegantly
in the Solaris
demonstrated
asymmetry
a
on
The
not
is
which
the
experiment.
thought
planet
biosphere
no
astronauts depend.
comes
life
forms
do.
This
after
Indeed,
dependency
the ethical commitment,
to let the space station fall
when Kris decides
into Solaris's gravitational
field. Biospheric
holism,
then, is at odds with
the infinite responsibility
towards
the political
animal opened
up by a
to coexist?that
decision
is, to coexist ultimately with coexistence
itself,
we
or
which
whether
not.
like
it
a
is
Solaris
radical
text
of
happens
us
it
since
a
of
the
of
animality,
deprives
phantasmatic
support
a
wonderful
in
web
of
Gaian
life
like
couch
world,
which,
background
the Iraq War, we
potatoes
spectating
In our age of
ecological
sense
or
and/or
SubStance
of
"nature"
non-sentient
#117,
Vol.
"the
panic,
environment"
"world."
37, no.
are "embedded."
what we are losing
This world
as
an
enveloping,
provided
is precisely
this
nonhuman
background
to our
3, 2008
94 Timothy Morton
in its opacity, acting as a

foreground,
offering meaningfulness
precisely
screen on which we project our fantasies. Wordsworthian
Romanticism
is a locus of the artistic production
of this screen. Geoffrey Hartman's
view of nature as a sounding
board has not
analysis of Wordsworth's
even
surpassed,
reduces Wordsworthian
been
the ecocriticism
that claims
that Hartman
no
matter
how much
Ironically,
screen
a kind of
to
Romantic
forms of deep ecology
imbue
this
with
try
on
as
is
side
the
of
the
abstract
"world"
personality,
deep ecology
firmly
to
that
of
the
The
between
gap
strange stranger.
pre-ontological
opposed
is far more properly
infinite than the palpable
vastness
of the
persons
natural or nonhuman
world of deep ecology. Deep-ecological
vastness
is
by
nature.
or immeasurable,
but always
there, like the authoritarian
or a thunderstorm.
In
of
the
Burkean
sublime?a
mountain
image
huge
our
in
to
tear
ontic
existence
the
the
substrate
of
with
patch up
striving
an
panic is thus part
ideologically
integrated, holistic Nature,
ecological
a left solution?
is
of
of the problem. Ecology without Nature,
then,
part
not a flight from Earth (really or metaphorically)
but dwelling with the
traumatic encounter with the torn ontic level. We must come
necessarily
measurable
to terms with
was
the fact not
that we
are destroying
Nature,
but
that there
no Nature.
The University
of California, Davis
Notes
to Scott Shershow,
on this essay,
comments
1. Thanks
David
and
for their helpful

and Dimitris
Vardoulakis
Simpson
to Derek
with me about per
for corresponding
Parfit
sonal
identity.
this
2. I develop
160-9. Other
scholars
have
Ecology without Nature,
more
can stand in for history,
in
and
of
the
weather
figures
See for example
Cadava.
less problematic
ways.
on animals
seminar
is a case in point. See
3. The recent publication
of Derrida's
complete
Cited.
Works
noted
the ways
further
this fully
I discuss
5. See Lacoue-Labarthe
4.
in Morton,
in which
in The Ecological
Thought.
57-8.
Scott
and Nancy
Shershow
has powerfully
demonstrated
this
193-205).
(165-82,
linkage
?
into Animal
from Poems
6. Denise
"Come
1960-1967,
Presence,"
Levertov,
copyright
Limited
of New Directions,
Levertov,
Pollinger
by permission
by Denise
reprinted
and the proprietor.
in "The Politics
of Impassiv
Vardoulakis
asserted
7. This has been strongly
by Dimitris
See also Wall.
and Spinoza."
ity in Agamben
and
in Atterton
in A Thousand
of the argument
8.
I am thinking
Plateaus,
reprinted
Animal
Calarco's
Philosophy.
9. I take my cue from Ferry 53^.
10. http://news.bbc.co.Uk/2/hi/technology/6425927.stm.
see Harrison,
11. For a comprehensive
2, 5, 84, 186.
especially
study
SubStance
#117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008
95
Animals
Unworking
Ecologocentrism:
and Zizek's
of Agamben's
is surely
the environmental
significance
the Muselmann
160-2).
(Homo Sacer 184-5; Zizek
this with
to Dimitris
for discussing
Vardoulakis
13. I am grateful
further discussion.
see Morton,
14. For further discussion,
Ecology without Nature,
see Morton,
15. For further
discussion
Nature,
Ecology without
119-23.
12. This
discussion
of
me.
See Hamacher
for
29-78.
and Heise
84-5,
53-4,
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Timothy Morton - Ecologocentrism. Unworking Animals

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University of Wisconsin Press

Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

of the idea of an essential,

in the cycle of the eternally

5).2 Likewise, when

about the aura: it is a

are not living in the mountains,

in an open system without

in this infinite net hangs a magnificently

shows that life forms are no less intricately,

the arrivant, the utterly unexpected

is an endless network of strange strangeness:

is this joy? That no animal

inspects his strange

only the sight that

stops and the boundary begins.

the capacity for

is not, "Can animals

that resisted the separation of human and animal would

angst and meditative

Gaian language portrays

with his ex-lover Rheya, who committed

1972 film adaptation,

of her status as an embodiment

of this liquid being, Rheya

can only tentatively call species.

a special page that writes

#117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008

animals. As Lacan says of alterity, "what constitutes

causes the forest and the trees, depersonalization

(104). This view

that this subjective difference

the truism that all sentient

life forms. The

the gaze of the other, is always the "animal

#117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008

at the back of the animal.12

A caress of shame! Indeed, the planet insists upon communication.

and thus includes content of which he cannot be aware.

again, now capable of acting as if the suicide had never happened.

renders Kris's encounter with the real of the

field is such that the space station temporarily

the fronds slowly undulate,

the (other) planet, the environment

ecology is faced with the choice between Nature and ecology.

level. Thus "animal passivity" will have entered

art at its finest?environmental

real of the environment-turned

The encounter with the sentient

in the sermon "The

It is as if Kris leaps out of the film's content and into its

(McDowell 256). Derek Parfit, whose Reasons and Persons strongly

this idea is to mean

the phrase "United Nations."

to the idea of subjective difference

lovers and tree huggers.

in its opacity, acting as a

the fact not

for their helpful

#117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008

and Felix Guattari.

Forests: The Shadow

of Place and Sense