The Ecological Thought by Timothy Morton

Author:Timothy Morton [Morton, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780674049208
Publisher: HarvardUniversityPress
Published: 2011-12-24T05:00:00+00:00

QUEER DUCKS

These questions extend Turing’s proposition that if a machine walks like a mind and quacks like a mind, it might as well be one.107 The uncanny and uncertainty are basic to the ecological thought. If we try to get rid of them, we conjure up Nature that rises up to judge, monitor, and discipline: we don’t love Nature properly; we should act natural; unnaturalness will be noted and punished. Environmentalism has been trapped in ideologies of masculinity, the ultimate performance of nonperformance, the ultimate imitation of Nature. This goes not only for subjects who experience Nature but also for objects—Nature itself. We often think of Nature as female. But Nature is also masculine, if masculinity means a desperate attempt to peel the feminine dimension of pure semblance away from one’s being.

Rugged, bleak, masculine Nature defines itself through extreme contrasts. It’s outdoorsy, not “shut in.” It’s extraverted, not introverted. It’s heterosexual, not homosexual. It’s able-bodied—“disability” is nowhere to be seen, and physical “wholeness” and “coordination” are valued over the spontaneous body.108 As the private school motto put it, “a sound mind in a sound body.” Nature is aggressively healthy, hostile to self-absorption. It’s allergic to semblance. Appearance should have a point: those mountains over there must be about themselves, or my soul, or Nature, and so on. There is no room for irony, no room for anything more than superficial ambiguity. Things should mean what they say and say what they mean. There is no room for humor, except perhaps a phobic, “hearty” kind. Masculine Nature is the operating system of the authoritarian personality.

Masculine Nature fears its own shadow—subjectivity itself. It wants no truck with the night of the world, the threateningly empty dimension of open subjectivity.109 This dimension is feminine. “Feminine” is a term, perhaps a patriarchal one, for the open, purely apparent dimension of subjectivity. 110 Environmental phenomena exhibit this concrete infi nity.111 Levinas talks of the “defenseless eyes” of the face.112 Masculine Nature is afraid of the nothingness of feminine “mere” appearance. It’s the Trickster quality found in many indigenous cultures. When we approach the idea that all sentient beings are equal and free, we discover the Trickster.

The ecological thought gets along just fine with the Trickster. Thinking itself is tricky. When you think, you move from one place to another, from A to not-A. Like a magic show, thinking is this tricky play. The ecological thought is the Trickster, thinking of the Trickster. Turing’s own wonderful example of his test is not about a human and a nonhuman but a man and a woman. The man has to convince the interviewer that he might be a woman, and vice versa. Is not this the height of Trick-sterishness? And doesn’t it demonstrate that identity is a performance—you can walk and quack like a duck, like a woman, like a mind?113 This is about what evolutionists call “satisficing”: instead of becoming optimal for their environments, living beings do just enough to look and quack like themselves.114 The ecological

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