Dark Ecology
For a Logic of Future Coexistence
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- £21.99
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- £21.99
Publisher Description
Timothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or Möbius strip, twisted to have only one side. Deckard travels this oedipal path in Blade Runner (1982) when he learns that he might be the enemy he has been ordered to pursue. Ecological awareness takes this shape because ecological phenomena have a loop form that is also fundamental to the structure of how things are.
The logistics of agricultural society resulted in global warming and hardwired dangerous ideas about life-forms into the human mind. Dark ecology puts us in an uncanny position of radical self-knowledge, illuminating our place in the biosphere and our belonging to a species in a sense that is far less obvious than we like to think. Morton explores the logical foundations of the ecological crisis, which is suffused with the melancholy and negativity of coexistence yet evolving, as we explore its loop form, into something playful, anarchic, and comedic. His work is a skilled fusion of humanities and scientific scholarship, incorporating the theories and findings of philosophy, anthropology, literature, ecology, biology, and physics. Morton hopes to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and to help us rediscover the playfulness and joy that can brighten the dark, strange loop we traverse.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Morton (Hyperobjects), a philosopher and professor of English at Rice University, attempts with mixed results to poetically jump-start a searching reevaluation of philosophy, politics, and art in light of the current ecological crisis. The book is strange, and some may find it decidedly uncanny. In and through its looping prose, he argues that there are strata of acclimatizations that must be made in mind, body, and soul for humans to come to "ecognosis": the knowledge that our very conception of nature might be what is destroying it. In a stream-of-consciousness style, Morton weaves together scientific and humanistic perspectives to craft a text that argues that the current ecological crisis is linked to a "logistical program' " that has been present in human systems since the Stone Age. "Dark ecology" is the recognition that the changes that must be made involve melancholy, irony, unsettling joy, and ultimately radical transformations in the ways humans conceive of, and live in, the universe. Morton commands readers' attention with his free-form style, but some may find it as repellent as it is compelling. Morton extends his previous work to offer a seismically different vision of the future of ecology and humankind.
