Hi again.

School starts soon (quarter system). I returned from the retreats. And I’m finishing an essay called “Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals,” for SubStance.

All feeble excuses for my not yet posting my final thoughts on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

They’re about the sheer “thereness” of existence, its density—what “world” subsumes and half erases. And its relation to intimacy.

I’ve been getting some excellent feedback on my first draft of The Ecological Thought.

The SubStance essay is a study of Solaris, the incredible science fiction story of a psychologist’s encounter with a radically other mind.

It claims that just as Derrida argues that logocentrism underlies Western philosophy’s attempt to ground meaning in an essential form, I hold that ecologocentrism underpins most environmentalist philosophy, preventing access to the full scope of interconnectedness.

Thinking, even environmentalist thinking, has set up “Nature” as a reified thing in the distance, “over there,” under the sidewalk, on the other side where the grass is always greener, preferably in the mountains, in the wild.  This “Nature” accords with Walter Benjamin’s proposition about the aura: it is a function of distance.  Benjamin uses an image from “Nature”—or from the picturesque?  But that is my and his point—to describe the aura: “We define the aura . . . as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close [the object] may be.  If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”

In Ecology without Nature I argued that it was the very idea of Nature itself that posed an obstacle to ecological thinking and praxis. Nature has recently received various upgrades, for example in the form of ecophenomenology, which insists that we are embedded (like Iraq War reporters) in a lifeworld. This language comes from Heidegger.

If the ecological thought is to tunnel back behind Heidegger, it must encounter the thinking of Emmanuel Lévinas.

Lévinas argues that below Being, beyond essence, closer than breathing, is the proximity of the really other other, the strange stranger in the language of The Ecological Thought. Unnameable as such, yet still palpable as an excess or “lapse” within the ontological order of things, is “the face,” Lévinas’s word for the strange stranger as we encounter her, or him, or it. Our very being is both subtended and interrupted by the face of the other, who stands destitute before us and before whom we too are destitute. Sadder and wiser.

In Otherwise than Being, Lévinas declares that the face is “the collapse of phenomenality,” in that it is “too weak” and “less than a phenomenon” (88). The face of the neighbor causes “the human” to “shudder” (87). The asymmetrical contact between us and the face causes us to revert “from grasping to being grasped, like in the ambiguity of a kiss” (80). More passive than inertia, this contact is “an inversion of the conatus [Spinoza's word for the will to live] of esse” (75). It is “not an extrapolation of the finite, or the invisible taken to be behind the visible” (154). It is on this side, “a hither side of the here” (180). This would be an encounter that did not take place within a lifeworld. A non-holistic reality where my obligation subverts the creation of worlds, with their insides and outsides, their included and excluded. Where identity was not—where personhood and phenomenality were less than you expected.

Is this not the shuddering of the Wedding Guest before the Mariner?

But is it not also the shuddering of the Mariner before Life-in-Death, a face consumed with leprosy?

And might it contain an encounter with the sheer existence existing things—“a thousand thousand slimy things” as the Mariner says (4.238)? This existence, which includes the Mariner’s own “liv[ing] on” (4.238). Might this ecological “element” in which we are immersed also be visible in the disturbed and disturbing face of the other? And is the ecological thought therefore a coexistence with coexistence itself (and with coexistents, as it were)? Lévinas grants this possibility when he asserts that the “absurd” there is (his phrase for sheer existence) can be “a modality of being-for-the-other” (164). In fact, you need the “weight” of this existence for alterity to go beyond essence (164). Lévinas himself opens the possibility that the there is with its incessant “splashing” (140) might be the face itself, as if the face were glimpsed obliquely, that nothing truly separates background from foreground, just a “strange distortion” (Shelley).

Something like this happens in The Triumph of Life, when in an Arcimboldo moment, a root twists into the face of Rousseau. And it happens in Frankenstein, when a creature made of pieces of animals and human corpses rises up to embrace its terrified maker.

Isn’t this the horror of Life-in-Death? The gentleness and ambiguity of her threat to essence? Her existence is ambiguity in all its fullness. She does nothing, really. She merely appears; she casts dice; she speaks, and whistles. Her face rots away. She floats on the sea, space of nomads, pirates, traders, gamblers, not tied to the State, beyond the law. She is as passive as the Mariner. It is finally her passivity that disturbs. We behold her; we are beholden to her.

Hi everyone.

You may be wondering what I’m going to do with these posts. Well—I decided before I started that I was going to experiment with this new medium by posting some close reading. And that I was going to write things that wouldn’t be in any of my forthcoming books or essays.

So this is where you get it…

Close reading is itself an endangered species, as presses close their doors to books on literature. (UC press doesn’t do it at all any more, for instance; and try getting a book on poetry or theory out there, esp. in the UK.) Close reading’s environment is dying.

I think blogging provides an excellent habitat for close reading.

I was wondering how my assumption was working—my assumption that the blog medium itself, and the RC site in particular, would provide the necessary context for these organs without bodies…

Hi Everyone.

Very kindly, Ron asked me to post a synopsis of my doings here. Writing it was very helpful.

I’m quite jazzed from having just come out of a theory class where I was teaching Althusser, so you may recognize some things Lacanian in here. But I hope I’ve made the language fairly obvious.

It was one of those happy classes when you allow yourself to think, hey, this critique thing might just be possible…

If you still want to find out more, go to my blog Ecology without Nature.

Here we go:

The ecological thought—mission statement
Timothy Morton

Think of a Rorschach blot: as well as looking like a cloud or a person, it is just a meaningless stain. Aside from content and form, texts are blobs of others’ enjoyment, literally—they are made of ink—and less literally, but still fantasy is a part of reality. Therefore reading is fundamentally coexistence with others. To read a poem is a political act, a nonviolent one. At the very least, there is an appreciation, with no particular reason, of another’s enjoyment. I would argue that (at least closely analytical) reading goes beyond mere toleration, towards a more difficult, disturbing, and potentially traumatic encounter with enjoyment—which is always “of the other,” even when it’s your own.

Reading a text is a profoundly ecological act, because ecology, at bottom, is coexistence (with others, of course), which implies interdependence. What I call the ecological thought is the thinking of this coexistence and interdependence to the fullest possible extent of which we are capable. If we are going to make it through the next few decades, we will have explored deeply the implications of coexistence.

Some of these implications are highly disturbing to “environmentalist” ideology: that we are not living in a “world”; that there is no Nature; that holism is untenable; that personhood is a form of artificial intelligence; that ecology is queer down to the genomic level, and so on. These highly counterintuitive conclusions are forced on us by the ecological thought itself, which is thinking coexistence, coexistence as thinking.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is about reading as coexistence beyond mere toleration. On many levels, it presents ecological coexistence as a theme. At its most profound, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner forces us to coexist with coexistence itself, with the meaningless distortion of the real. It is a poem whose reading helps us to think the ecological thought. My blogging here is a contribution to this project. I am finishing a book called The Ecological Thought in which I explore these issues in a different way.

We hailed it in God’s name.

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1.66)

We made it! And, as you probably guessed, we’re going to look at the various significances of “hailing,” not to mention “in God’s name.” This means getting busy with Heidegger and Lévinas.

Note that the Albatross is still an “it.” (See my previous posts for analysis.)

On the shelf above my computer a printout from the Oxford English Dictionary has been sitting since February 2005. It’s a printout concerning the word “Hello.” Yes, I’ve been meaning to think this through for three and a half years! Thank you, Romantic Circles!

Here’s the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: “An exclamation to call attention; also expressing some degree of surprise, as on meeting any one unexpectedly.”

The dictionary continues:

A. as int. a. Also as a greeting. [Earliest citation 1883. Earliest citations are given in brackets below.]

b. Used as an answer to a telephone call. [1892]

B. as n. [1897]

Hence hello v., to shout hello!” [1895]

Things have changed somewhat in the new online edition. For a start, citations have been pushed back to around the time of the second version of our poem! The sense of “hello” as a greeting was emerging while Coleridge was refashioning The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

A. int.

1. Used as a greeting. Also in extended use. [1827]

2. Used to attract attention. [1833] [In the Althusserian sense: as when a police officer in an British comedy says “Allo, allo, allo! What's all this then?”] [“Hi” has something of this resonance]

3. Used to express surprise or to register an unexpected turn of events. [1838]

4. Used to answer a telephone call. [1877]

5. colloq. (orig. U.S.). Used to imply (sometimes disbelievingly or sarcastically) that the person addressed is not paying attention, has not understood something, or has said something nonsensical or foolish. [1985] [Let's call this one the Californian hello]

B. n. An utterance of “hello”; a greeting. [1854]

Notice how the definitions are assigned discrete numbers (five of them), as if the new dictionary were giving up on trying to explore the meaning of the word deeply. The telephone-answering “hello” is now sense A.4. rather than sense A.b. The sense that was given a place at the top of the hierarchy in the second edition (“An exclamation to call attention…”) is now assigned position A.2., and the dictionary gives no overall sense. Notice also the frequent “Used to”s—it’s as if the dictionary is backing off defining words.

Is this a function of our neighbor-(in)tolerant, postmodern-totalitarian world? I would like to see whether these features—replacing metaphorical hierarchy with metonymic lists, giving up on an “umbrella” definition at the top of a hierarchy, and referring to English as if it were spoken by some exotic subject of anthropological research (all the “used to”s)—are widespread in the new dictionary. Isn’t this seeming backing-away from hierarchy, from saying what you think, urgently recursive in the case of “hello,” the very word we insert so casually into every interaction to welcome, to start communicating, to hail the other?

Don’t we lose the richness of the second edition’s definition—this is no lament for a lost presence, but in a way, for a lost absence, for a lost sense of the unexpected: “An exclamation to call attention; also expressing some degree of surprise, as on meeting any one unexpectedly.” The very phrasing here enacts the surprise it’s describing. There’s the pause that turns out to be a slightly negative “moreover“; a tentative approach to the existence of an other; the final encounter with “any one.”

We shall shortly find these issues key to the ecological thought that emerges like a viral code in the lines we are interpreting.

I would like to restore to this most tritely well known part of Coleridge’s masterpiece the full weight, the gravitational field, of the profound ambivalence that marks the seemingly casual appearance of the Albatross. I believe that if we don’t account for this gravitational density, we won’t be reading the poem ecologically. It would be far too easy to claim either that the bird stands for Nature, or for Supernature. This is the black hole of the poem. The Mariner just shoots the Albatross, for no stated reason. No meaning escapes from this part. We need to respect the black holiness if we’re going read it properly. So to work.

Hel-lo! It looks like “hello” is bound up with the history of telephonics. Strangely, though, it seems telephonic before telephones, as it were. If you express surprise “on meeting any one unexpectedly,” it’s as if you are not yet talking with them, but are signaling that talking may or may not happen. It’s a word that brings into language the proximity of an other.

It’s a phatic utterance, in the language of the structuralist Roman Jakobson. It draws attention to the medium in which the message is transmitted. When you use it sarcastically, in the Californian manner, it’s as if you are pointing out some imaginary communications breakdown. I visualize someone knocking on a glass helmet, or holding a telephone away from one’s mouth and shouting “Hel-lo!”

(Phatic messages are the essence of what I call ambient poetics, which is the cornerstone of Ecology without Nature. All messages are environmental, because they encode their medium into their form. All art is, to this extent, ecological. Ecology will soon become a term like race, gender, and class, with which it is inextricably entwined in any case—a term you look for even when the supposed content of a text is not environmental per se.)

“Hello” is an etymological variant of “hallo,” which derives from “hollo” (the word in our poem), “hullo,” “hillo,” and “holla.”

Here are the definitions for the oldest variant, “hollo.”

A. int. A call to excite attention, also a shout of encouragement or exultation. [1588]

B. n. A shout of hollo! a loud shout; esp. a cry in hunting [1598] [c.f. “hey,” as in The Tempest, when Prospero and Ariel pretend to be commanding hunting dogs—“Hey Mountain, hey!” IV.1]

[“Hi” coincides with this:

?c1475 Hunt. Hare 136 Thei cryed, ‘Hy, hy!’ all at ones ‘Kyll! kyll! for kockes bownes!’ 1747 Gentl. Mag. 39 Hold, hold, 'tis a double; hark hey! bowler hye! If a thousand gainsay it, a thousand shall lye. 1847 ALB. SMITH Chr. Tadpole xxx. (1879) 267 ‘Hi!’ cried the brigand, giving the mule a bang with the butt-end of his musket. ‘Hi!’ 1886 FENN This Man's Wife II. ii, It was not a thrilling word..it was only a summonsan arrest. Hi! 1894 In Alpine Valley I. 47 Here, hi! have a cigar? 1897 Daily News 2 Oct. 3/3 A good lunch, and then hi! for the Crystal Palace.]

Hmm, hunting…hel-lo.

It is indeed in sense B. that the dictionary cites our poem:

1598 TOFTE Alba (1880) 79 But when th’ acquainted Hollow he doth heare..He leaues his flight, and backward turnes againe. 1670 Caveat to Conventiclers 4 He was no sooner seated, but he gave a lowd Hollow through the Air. 1697 tr. C’tess D’Aunoy’s Trav. (1706) 9 They set forth lowder Hollows than before, and wished me a good Journey. 1798 COLERIDGE Anc. Mar. I. xviii, The Albatross…every day for food or play, Came to the Marinere’s hollo! 1823 BYRON Age of Bronze xiii, The hounds will gather to their huntsman’s hollo.

So the conventional way to read the passage on the Albatross would be to see a progressive degradation in communication. First the bird is “hailed…in God’s name”; then it “came to the Mariners’ hollo,” like a hunting dog; then, like a hunted bird, it’s shot. It goes from lofty, almost angelic being to hunted animal in the space of a few verses. We descend from hail, to hello, to hi! Or even to oi [1936]!

It would be very easy, in this reading, to conclude that the telephonic hello had turned us away from Being, had turned us all into hunting dogs. Too easy perhaps.

Even the “hunting dog” sense of “hollo” has its ambivalence, between a call to play, and a call to return to the master. Unless play were always a simulation of hunting. Surely the bird comes “for food or play,” not to retrieve other dead birds! It is no hawk. In a sense the sailors themselves are playing, pretending that the bird is a kind of hawk. A pet. Like pretending that a rather ungainly golden retriever were a wolf. Of course the Albatross is “wild,” not “domestic.” But it’s not hawk-wild, not majestic-wild. It’s ungainly, it’s disturbingly wild. It’s “abject-wild” (more of this in a moment). Its hugeness is wonderfully captured in Mervyn Peake’s illustration of the Albatross hung about the Mariner’s neck at the end of Part 2.

Now it seems as if there is a hesitation within the word “hello” itself, a hesitation that addresses (welcomes?) the matter at hand. For you can say “hello” and be speaking to yourself—“hello, how curious…”—as if the expression of wonder at an unexpected encounter (with an other) provoked a self-reflexive version of the Californian “hel-lo”—perhaps a less sarcastic, more gentle version. As if the strange stranger (because that’s what we’re talking about) provoked a self-reflection that was decidedly not a closed loop, but an opening. Or, better, as if the self-reflection noticed that an opening was already there, as if one had cut oneself and one was looking at the wound. “Hello” is the sound of someone noticing a wound. A gentle wound, perhaps, just a “lapse in being” as Lévinas puts it. Curiouser and curiouser (Alice in Wonderland style).

Then there is the tentative “hello?” that someone utters in a dark room when they are not sure whether anyone is there or not. It’s like the echolocation of a bat or the sonar of a dolphin. This can also be a test of the medium of transmission itself, like a “ping” command to a url when you’re not sure your internet is working. This hello says “I am here” and “This is here,” at once. Interesting, therefore, that Jakobson suggested that bird cries were phatic in this sense. When a parrot parrots a human word, it’s not saying that word, it’s saying hello. There’s a wonderful ambivalence just within this hello, as if it meant “Is this a medium? Or not?” “Is this thing on?” (The saying of which might activate the realm of meaning, might indeed magically “switch it on” as it were). This is an illocutionary hello that does something in the saying of it, in its very ambivalence. “Is this on?” becomes “This is on!”

This hello, too, has its ambivalence. It appears to begin communication (that’s what Jakobson says the phatic function is for—to demarcate communication from non-communication). It’s a minimal mark, a sort of on switch. But doesn’t the on switch imply the existence of an electrical circuit, a house, a shared existence, a being together? The existence of at least one (more) person? As if the darkness itself of the dark room, the Lévinasian “night” of sheer existence, were already populated, were already a communicative field, an electrical circuit. There is already information-space. Space is already warped by language. The “third” is already in the other, waiting in the darkness, even when there’s no-one.

This (co)existence subtends and subverts easy communication, with its inside–outside system. “Hello” implies a pre-existing boundary between information and noise. An unspeakable coexistence.

And there is the “hello!” that summons, like a hunting dog, the other.

When you say hello on the phone, are you saying it in the first, second, or third sense? What kind of mixture?

When you “hail” something “in God’s name,” are you welcoming a predictable stranger into an already well established domain? Is the bird an ambassador from God’s domain, as it were, or are the sailors ambassadors for God, welcoming a foreigner to their “far countree”? The ecological irony here would be that the sailors are definitely in the albatross’s world, a hostile ecosystem. This welcome “in God’s name” would then be a colonial greeting to someone who already lived there. The bird should beware, in that case. It is already dead.

Is the hailing therefore already a kind of hunting-dog hulloo? Summoning a predictable object or tool (living or inanimate, already dead) to a predictable place? As when a car mechanic you called on your cellphone arrives on the deserted highway? “Hello! Thank God you’re here!” (Again, I find Coleridge’s poem weirdly predictive.)

For Heidegger poetry is a hailing (Heil—we can’t but help hear the resonances, hel-lo!). This hailing appears to take place in, and/or to establish, a medium, a world. There is a sheen of otherness, a shimmering of the veil as he puts it, in the theater of the Same. The curtain swishes back (hello) to reveal a world.

Now hailing positively implies a lifeworld. A Norse one at that. Like “life” and “world” themselves, “hail” has an Old English root. To salute, to wish welcome, to “hail” is a metonymy of the noun “hail,” which means a mixture of “Health, safety, welfare. In northern ME. taking the place of the native Eng. hele, HEAL” (OED, “hail,” n2.1). The origin of the word is Old Norse, “heill health, prosperity, good luck” (OED). “Heal” or “hele” is an amalgam of health, good fortune, spiritual well-being—there’s an integrated world, a horizon of meaning, a mind-body manifold that ecophenomenologists can only dream of.

Perhaps the lifeworld already had some tatters in it by the time “hail” acquired its nautical sense [1546], the sense we still use when we hail a taxi (v2.3, 4 and 4b—the latter being the one we use when we ask “where do you hail from?”). Now we’re beginning to pick up a telephonic register—a calling or summoning from afar.

(Irony: when Heidegger says that poetry makes the absence of things present, brings the farness of things near, is he not thus distorting hele and hail and heal-thiness towards its modern, telephonic sense? Take a look at Avital Ronell’s incredible The Telephone Book.)

Perhaps, however formal the hello tries to be, however much the ambassadors have prepared the party to receive their guest, there is always the trace of a radical uncertainty, effaced in the pomp and circumstance of welcome, and all the more visible in its effacement. Thus “in God’s name” strives to efface this uncertainty, to underwrite the encounter with God’s name (I can’t help thinking of the welcome to Munchkin Land in The Wizard of Oz!). It interpellates the Albatross into a theistic symbolic order, and thus functions like the police officer’s “Allo, allo, allo!”—an expression of predictable surprise, of a crime caught in the gaze of the law. Something fishy is going on in the ice.

This deep ambivalence serves in part to undo the work of “As if it had been a Christian soul.” It is as if the sailors can’t tell, or don’t want to tell, whether the bird is metaphorically or literally an emissary from God, or actually is God, emerging through the fog. To “hail it in God’s name” in this sense might be to think of it as God itself, or himself, or herself, God in person, as person: to ascribe the name of God to the Albatross itself.

For there is yet another hello—the abject hello, the hello we say when we see someone who’s already there, whom we do not like, or who does not like us. “Oh, it’s you.” Isn’t there something like this in the first line, “It is an ancient Mariner” (1.1)? He never gave us a chance to say hello. He was already there. Even though we don’t technically like or dislike him yet, his presence disgusts and disturbs us. Surely this is not the hello the sailors want to be heard when they greet the Albatross. But perhaps it haunts their hello all the same.

The abject hello is the underside of reverence, the dark, ugly side of hailing. It is what hailing tries to excrete, to maintain its reverent authority.

When we greet the strange stranger, we are embarrassed by the fact that she, he, or it is already there. In the most intimate possible sense, for our existence is coexistence. There is already less of us to go around, and less of the strange stranger. The strange stranger from the first is not an integrated being greeting another integrated being in a more or less well established medium. “Hello” will always contain a trace of an awkardness, even hostility (Derrida: “hostipitality”), which it will struggle to edit out. The smooth, easy-wipe “hello” of a computerized telephone answering system or customer service contains the echo of this awkwardness in its very smoothness.

The sailors’ joy and relief (if that is what is implied in their hailing) has an exorbitant element within it. Perhaps it is this excess enjoyment that ends up getting the bird killed. It eats their biscuit worms, shares their world, seems to guide them through the ice. Perhaps their unbearable dependency on it is precisely what provokes the shooting. Or, aware of their humiliation (the bird sees it, even plays along with it), they kill what they welcomed with such relief. We will never know.

There is perhaps an isomorphic backward glance at the end of part 2, when the “death-fires danced at night” in a sickening reel (“About, about, in reel and rout”), and the bird is hung from the ancient Mariner’s neck, another humiliation. It could be read as a phantasmagorical increase of the play and fantasy that seemed innocent in the sailors’ play with the Albatross. It gets even worse in Part 3, of course, when Death and Life-in-Death are playing for possession of the crew (“casting dice”).

One of the ways in which Nature shuns ecology is in its rejection of the queer Trickster.

The Albatross appears to have come from a beyond, but who knows? Do the sailors know? Is there not some vaguely hidden recognition that the appearance of the bird and the sailors’ joy closes off the beyond forever? That the Albatross hails not from a beyond that gives meaning to a world bounded by a horizon, but appears abruptly on this side of a radically incomplete Universe, too close for comfort?

Isn’t this how the utterly trite meaning of the Albatross, a karmic weight around your neck, a weight that is detachable from the poem, even, as if this part of the poem were itself the Albatross of the poem—isn’t this how the trite meaning captures something profoundly true? That what we are witnessing here is gravity—matter itself, pulling us, pinning us to this side of reality? The horror of fog and mist is that it abolishes the background. Suddenly everything is foreground. The lifeworld goes up in smoke. The apocalyptic curtain is drawn around the beyond. The Albatross comes out from behind the curtain of mist, from out of its endless folds—we have no idea how far it’s traveled (or not).

Isn’t this anti-Wagner art, where you get to see the curtain wafting around, where you get to see that it hides not a world, not a horizon or a beyond, but a horrifying nothingness in its folds? This is the meaningless contingency in the face of which the sailors desperately try to rig up some kind of superstitious meaning in Part 2.

We are witnessing demystification, yes, but not so that we can see the workings underneath—another kind of apocalypse, and thus another kind of mystery. We are demystified, but there also takes place an “infinitization,” a disturbing appearance of infinity on this side of things. It just “cross[es]” the ship’s path, “At length.” No fuss, no bother really—just a reminder that we’re still alive.

How do we live in this world, on this side of reality, which is ecological coexistence, so easy to negate with apocalypticism, which now itself takes ecological forms? So easy to imagine the death of humanity, mass extinction—ha, that’ll teach those Cartesians! They’ll be laughing on the other side of their face when they’re dead! Is this why we are writing ecological criticism? To increase our Schadenfreude? Aren’t we just like the sailors, humiliated when our dreams (of Nature) are disturbed, wishing not for a genuine coexistence with other beings, but for a return to sleep, to green dreams?

I’ve been writing a bit about infinity, so I thought it might be good to take a step aside and look at this some more.

Imagine a line. Now remove the middle third. You have two shorter lines with an equal-sized space between them. Now remove the middle thirds of the two lines you have left. Keep going!

You are creating something like a Cantor set. It was discovered by the brilliant mathematician Georg Cantor in the 1880s. Cantor got into a lot of trouble for his thoughts on infinity. But his discoveries laid the foundations for set theory, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, and Alan Turing’s thinking on Artificial Intelligence.

If you think about it, the Cantor set contains an infinite number of points. Yet it also contains an infinite number of no-points! It appears to contain two different infinities. Does this make it weirdly larger than an infinity of points alone?

Talk about holding infinity in the palm of your hand. A two-dimensional version is known as Cantor dust: infinite dust, and infinite no-dust. If you make a three-dimensional version, you will produce something like a Menger sponge, a fractal object with infinity spaces and infinity points. You can’t squeeze a Menger sponge. But there’s something there all the same.

The strange stranger I referred to in the last posting is like the Menger sponge. Somehow, we have discovered infinity on this side of phenomena.

Who or what is a strange stranger? The category includes, but is not limited to, “animals,” “nonhmans,” and “humans.” In The Ecological Thought I refrain from using the word “animals” (unless in quotation marks). “Nonhumans” strictly refers to the set of those entities who are not Homo sapiens.

Now behold this Menger-sponge-like strange stranger, Astrophyton darwinium:

O happy living thing! What a wonderful drawing by Ernst Haeckel, the man who gave us the word “ecology.”

Alain Badiou refers to his Lacanian “set theory” as “pre-Cantorian.” (See Kenneth Reinhard’s essay in The Neighbor.) Now I’m not convinced you can actually have pre-Cantorian set theory—this would be like having pre-Newtonian gravitational theory (strike one against Badiou!). But you can have a non-Cantorian set theory. This has to do with whether or not you accept Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis, a project that ended up driving him insane. The Continuum Hypothesis states that there is no set whose size is strictly between the set of integers (1, 2, 3…) and the set of real numbers (rational numbers—integers and fractions—plus irrational ones like pi). As far as I know (I’m no mathematician) the issue is open right now. I’d like to know more about this, and I’d like to know why Badiou and Lacan appear hostile to Cantor.

Intuitively, I find Cantor’s view of infinity (nay, infinities) very satisfying. Since I am by no means a mathematician I can’t explain this properly. Still, I believe that the kind of infinity to which Lévinas refers when he writes of the other (autrui)—my strange stranger—is not “beyond” this side of reality, if by “beyond” we mean an outside. An outside would imply an inside—and this would imply a metaphysical system. Inside–outside distinctions are the basic ingredients of metaphysics.

I find the idea of an ontologically incomplete Universe where there is no neat holistic nesting of parts in wholes very satisfying, though at present I lack the precise language in which to articulate this idea.

Rigorous materialism must take seriously the seemingly theological idea that infinity is on this side of reality. I believe that work on infinity will counteract the Heideggerian tendency in ecological discourse. Since I hold that we cannot avoid a form of fascism unless we circumvent Heidegger, I also believe that this work is of the utmost political significance.

Burying our heads in the vulgar materialist sand, or the utilitarian environmentalist sand, won’t do.

In general, we humanities scholars need some remedial math and science lessons. I’m dismayed that I have nothing but vague intuition to go on in suspecting Kenneth Reinhard’s essay (noted above) of Badiou hagiography—mostly the preponderance of “According to Badiou”s in it.

I would love it if a kind Romanticist would help me. Paging Arkady Plotnitsky…

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had ben a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name.

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1.63–66)

Greetings all. Thanks so much to Ash Nichols for his comment on my previous, concerning the ways Romantic poetry can get its natural history wrong. I’m going to have to think about this one before I reply to it, so stand by. But I think my paradoxical reading (below) might go some way towards addressing the last couple of remarks—that the traditional reading of the shooting of the albatross has to do with disrupting some kind of natural continuum. Ash very reasonably wonders why this is any worse than, say, shooting a turkey for Thanksgiving.

And thanks to Ron Broglio for his comment on “worlding” and Uexküll, Heidegger’s source. It’s not surprising to me that Heidegger edits animals out of the worlding club. Only humans can have a world, while animals are “poor in world,” German Weltarm. Like most continental philosophers, he wants to assert that there is a radical discontinuity between humans and animals. In a recent anthology of such writing, I was amazed to find a still-living writer who proudly “rejects” the theory of evolution. This to my mind is like rejecting the three-sidedness of triangles!

The haughtiness with which this rejection is performed is quite extraordinary to one who has spent several months reading all the Darwin he could get his hands on. It’s like something out of Gulliver’s Travels.

So then, to work…

It struck me that while the sun is personfied as “he” (see “Part Second” below), the Albatross is reified as an “it.” Given the isomorphism between the two phrases (“Out of the sea came he,” 1.26 / “Thorough the fog it came,” 1.64) I don’t think we can ignore this. Coleridge does indeed emphasize the inert density of the sheer existence of the life form. This gives “As if it had been a Christian soul” the full weight of its disturbing “As if”-ness.

The “As if” has the force of a fetishistic disavowal: “We knew very well that the Albatross wasn’t a human soul, nevertheless, we acted as if it did have one.” Isn’t this the beginning of the end for the rather trite conclusion at the end of the poem—that you should love “All things both great and small” (7.615), because God made and loves them? By the late eighteenth century this conclusion was already trite. It sounds like a regression from the extraordinary stance of the sailors, who are willing to “suspend their belief,” their “lifeworld” (a good God made and loves all creatures, in a paternalistic, safe fashion), and treat an “it” as a “soul.”

Far from pantheism, what the sailors achieve in Part 1 is in fact a radical form of non-theistic Christianity, taking seriously the idea that God died on the cross. The death of God and the death of the theistic cultural lifeworld (“To walk together to the kirk, / And all together pray,” 7.605–606—n.b. the Scots dialect, which localizes the sentiment within a certain cultural horizon), with its comforting concentric hierarchies (the “goodly company” of “Old men, and babes, and loving friends…,” 7.604, 7.608), provide far more plausible explanations for why the Wedding Guest leaves the “bridegroom’s door” “like one that hath been stunned, / And is of sense forlorn” (7.621–623), than the editorializing injunction to love “all things” (7.615). The bottom has fallen out of the Wedding Guest’s world. Why?

Because the encounters with sentient beings in The Ancient Mariner are not encounters with members of a holistic lifeworld. They are encounters with what I call the strange stranger, the ultimate way of welcoming (other) life forms. More on this as we proceed. But for now let’s note a startling conclusion. This is not a pantheist poem at all. In fact, what makes it most “ecological” is what makes it least pantheist. What makes it ecological is its disturbing, relentless intimacy, intimacy with the “it,” with Death and Life-in-Death, with “slimy things” (4.238), and so on.

Maybe the sailors are desperate for help. Maybe they are lonely. Whatever the reason, they greet the Albatross “As if it had been a Christian soul,” half knowing that their response is exorbitant. This greeting is perverse. Ecological ideology has thus far been virile, masculine, heteronormative, ablist and extravert (what else is wrong with it?!). The Ancient Mariner and his crew appear to outline a way of ecological existence that is still in our future. Beyond nature, beyond the lifeworld (“Below the kirk, below the hill,” 1.23), beyond holism, beyond sentimentalism.

Just as the Albatross emerges from the thick, intense “element” of ice and fog, as if the ice and fog had grown a face, so the sailors pick “it” out of the surrounding field of “it”s and “hail it,” welcome it “in God’s name” (1.65–66). This is on the way to love at its extreme: out of “all things” in the Universe (7.615), I pick you. It already has something “evil” about it, something disrupting to the cozy lifeworld. Far from being a gesture of pantheist inclusiveness and holism, the welcome radically disturbs the “balance of nature.”

To love another creature is a perverse choice, not a “letting be” or a snuggling together in a predetermined lifeworld. Isn’t the message of Frankenstein, which borrows heavily from this poem, to love sentient beings as people even when they aren’t people? We are getting into cyborg territory here, and we will have to think about Artificial Intelligence, about treating all “it”s as “you.”

The Albatross is the second disturbing “face” in the poem. We’ve already experienced a rupture of the lifeworld with the presence of the Ancient Mariner himself, who to the Wedding Guest also appears as an “It”: “It is an ancient Mariner” (1.1). This stranger too has the disturbing inertia of sheer existence, what Lévinas calls the “there is.” Lévinas’s image of the “there is” is the night: “I pass, like night, from land to land” says the Mariner, a walking poem (7.586). This walking poem, the “saying” of the Mariner, outlives and drastically dominates the Mariner as flesh and blood, “wrenching” him with “agony” (7.577–578) and compelling him to speak it. It is the Mariner who tacks on the trite sentiment that we live in a lifeworld that is not to be disrupted. The “Mariner-poem” speaks a far more disturbing truth. (See David Haney’s book on Coleridge and ethics for further discussion; and see Paul Youngquist’s review too).

The sailors’ welcome was prepared for, “in the offing,” otherwise the Albatross would just have been another phenomenon of the “element.” The sailors, in other words, were already in a position of vulnerability towards the other, already marked by the other’s existence. Existence is already coexistence. The Albatross is the Messianic “arrivant,” the absolutely unexpected arrival, the one we can never predict, but whose shadow falls into our world, in the disturbing proximity of all strangers.

In the same way, the “It is” of the ancient Mariner himself (1.1) compels us to imagine his existence prior to the beginning of the poem itself. He’s already there, as if some lines were missing: “Who the hell is that? It is an ancient Mariner.” Any attempt to create a cozy world thus edits out this existence, beyond the beginning. Beyond the lifeworld, beyond Being, the ecological thought is intimacy with the strange stranger. (More about them in the next post.)

(When I use “beyond” in the previous paragraph, I mean it in a special sense—not as in “over yonder” in a more hugely encompassing horizon than we can grasp, but “right here,” too close for comfort.)

The Judaeo-Christian reading of this poem is by no means at odds with the most profoundly ecological one. They are the same reading.

Shelley did have it right. Poems are from the future.

Onwards, onwards to line 66!

Hi again—back from my Q&A at the ASLE conference in Edinburgh. That was quick wasn’t it?! Thanks to videoconferencing I didn’t have to move an inch. I made a dvd of my keynote (in front of a “live audience” as they say in sitcoms), then did the Q&A via the cheap new Polycom software on the PC. Less carbon, less bankruptcy, more bang for my buck—effectively I gave the talk twice and received two lots of feedback.

Thanks so much to Greg Garrard, Tom Bristow, Margaret Ferguson, Terry Gifford, and the tech teams (Alastair Taylor, Mike Luthi and Bill Sykes) for making this work.

Okay—ready for some close reading? Here we go:

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name.

It ate the food it ne’er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through!

And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner’s hollo!

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke bright,
Glimmered the white moon-shine.

“God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look’st thou so?”—With my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross.

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1.59–82)

“Like noises in a swound”! When I was at high school I wasn’t sure what this meant, so my friend James (who ended up teaching at McGill) and I decided arbitrarily that for “swound” we would read “underground parking lot.” Another case of urbanature?! In any case, the atmosphere is wonderfully evoked by the “here…there…all around” trope. This is a place of sheer existence, of what Emmanuel Lévinas would have called the “rustling of the there is.” What a world. It reminds me of this one. Today in Davis, CA, we are wearing surgical masks to screen ourselves from the smoke from the pervasive fires (“the smoke is here, the smoke is there…”). Global warming is like this, isn’t it? You can’t have that neutral, easy conversation about the weather any more—it either trails off into silence, or becomes threateningly poised over the word “global warming,” and as soon as someone mentions that, the conversation is pretty much over. There is no weather any more. There is climate—as Ashton Nichols pointed out, we now have the computing power to map this global phenomenon (you need terabytes of RAM to do it, I gather). But no weather. Coleridge seems to anticipate this by putting his Mariner in the extreme ambience of ice. See Eric Wilson’s very interesting book about ice called The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination.

Okay, I’m out. More soon!

Hi everyone—Tim Morton here. I was asked to start blogging here on ecological issues, and I’m delighted to accept the invitation. I’m actually working on a book right now called The Ecological Thought. It’s kind of the prequel to Ecology without Nature. I mean this in a rigorous way—not just the fact that the first book implies a view that I outline more deeply in the second one. I mean that in a rigorous sense, this “ecological thought” weirdly creeps up on you from the future. The best I can compare it to is Shelley’s idea of poetry, that it’s like a shadow from the future that somehow looms into the world of the present (A Defence of Poetry). Anyway, stay tuned.

Here’s a good question for starters: am I an ecocritic? I fancy that what I’m doing is ecological literary criticism, but I’m not sure it’s ecocriticism. Already I don’t belong on this blog! Ecology without Nature argues that in order to have ecology, you have to give up Nature.

Lots of people don’t like this idea. It’s like I’m stealing their toy. I recently had an interesting conversation with Donna Haraway about it—of all people she was the very last I would have suspected of worrying about me stealing the Nature toy. But she was.

Her argument was basically about “worlding”—ideas and practices constitute “worlds” not just ideas; people do things in these worlds and create values in them, etc. (You will see if you’ve read my book that the “worlding” idea itself recursively falls prey to my “hand Nature over” gambit!) I thought of a good answer, but I was too scared to say: “The Nazis had lots of ideas, and those ideas constituted a world. If your argument is valid, we should have allowed the Nazis to have their world and should not have intervened in the Holocaust, etc.” Preserving an idea because it makes a world for you isn’t that great, I think. (Not even because it’s good or even useful, mind you.) I’m sure there was a whole wild world of witch ducking stools too.

Anyway…

I thought this blog would be a good place to do mini close readings that point the way towards the ecological thought—so expect some riffs in search of an album, some organs without bodies. First up: to whom are we speaking when we say “Hello”? (With a little help from Coleridge.)