Timothy Morton
Bennett's highly engaging study argues. The time is ripe for several reasons.
The current ecological crisis, far from imminent but rather fully underway,
has given rise to predictive and mapping instruments that can measure
climate in real time. Being a very complex derivative of weather, real time
which means that it quite a way beyond the capacity of an individual human
brain. This would explain a lot about global warming deniers, no? Climate is
not a palpable thing but it will kill you just as surely as a train with a
constant momentum will kill you, even if it slows down, if you're tied to the
tracks. Wet, palpable stuff like snow is now less real, in quite an obvious
sense, than something you can't see or feel. Something that affects
historical time scales. Plutonium, for example, has a half-life of 24 100 years.
This means that it will remain dangerously radioactive for longer than all of
fourth and fifth (and so on) examples of disturbing new materials in our era.
The three phenomena I've sketched are in the newspapers, let alone
Spinoza (and so on). But global warming and hyperobjects, not so much—
and nonlocality, which is the quantum issue, means that you don't have to
go to a Tibetan monastery to find out this kind of stuff. Someone down the
block from you on campus is thinking about it, right now. My colleagues in
reason—in particular the ones who say they are materialists. This has
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that seem more “real” than literature and art: humanities scholars can be
far more scientistic than scientists. But it also has to do with a phobia for
one rather belligerent fellow guilting us out for even thinking about
sound like an acid trip.” The funny thing is, the current state of physics
means that the view of matter as shiny pingpong balls, with a separate self
that has done some damage (shall we say) in its rather brief historical run.
Of course, the devil is in the details, and how human beings progress to a
point at which they are ready to drop the shiny pingpong balls might look
philosophy by another means and has its own theories to lay out. In this
paper I'll be discussing some of the ways in which art deals with expanded
materialism, but first some words about the implications of the three
called Nature. Global warming means that what humans have taken to be
redundant phatic conversations with strangers that you can now no longer
emerges in its place is the outlines of what elsewhere I am calling the mesh:
web of live to include, for example, non-living beings, or beings that do not
easily fall on one side or the other of the life–nonlife boundary, such as
Some of these beings include myself in the future, who in this view might as
well count as a different person. So, among their many effects, hyperobjects
are connected intimately with beings who are not related to us in any
interconnected even than the mesh concept I've just outlined. In the mesh,
things are deeply contiguous and symbiotic. In nonlocality things directly are
other things. This has to do with what physics calls entanglement. Physicist
paradox concerning quantum theory is not only valid, but empirically the
case. When two particles become entangled, you can separate them as
much as you like, and they will respond to information about the other one
like the idea of breaking the speed limit of light—an instantaneous message
would break this cosmic speed limit. Please be clear that “separate the
light years as you want. It actually means that. Little shiny pingpong balls are
Now there are various ways to proceed. One is the standard model,
tool, but don't ask it to tell you what it all means. Questions about what it
all means are impossible and absurd. The other possibility is the one
advanced by David Bohm and others, which some call (wrongly, I feel) the
The speed of light is still the cosmic speed limit. The reason why the
everything else. We are not really observing two particles—we are seeing
it's undivided, but not a thing or “one” in a more precise sense, since for
the argument at which words become difficult, which might have something
to do with the way our mind works—as Bohm, who likes thinking things to
the end, goes on to say. After all, standard quantum theory shows how
Uncertainty Principle means. Now I know what lots of you are thinking—
oh my God, it's only x am and Professor Morton has already gone off the
deep end into woo-woo land. I put it to you that you might be thinking this
deeper reason, because it's just not very gratifying not to have words or
concepts for things—or at any rate, something you can hold on to—
synthesis sets an arbitrary limit on what thinking can do. The trouble with
this view is that it's self-defeating. First of all, the view is a view—even
that “there is no metalanguage,” that is, one can never jump outside of
view hardwired into them, saying “Move along, there's nothing to see at the
quantum level” is saying that there's something to see. Lacan and Derrida
point out that all statements with grammaticality of some kind, that is,
but I'm talking about the hardcore one, which is really saying that signs and
the ideas and attitudes they code for are not like icing and cake: like if we
could ice the cake differently, it might taste better. In this respect, Lacan
Deleuzian) totalizer who thinks that she or he has done an end run around
The view of no-view, then, is like the Cretan liar paradox: it says
things at once, because statements have two levels (the statee and the
stater as it were). And this brings up the second self-defeating fact about
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Copenhagen, which has to do with the attitude or subject position that the
no-view view implies. If you throw in the towel and say “Ho hum, can't
make anything of that, never mind, pass the salt,” shouldn't it be okay for
others to keep trying? Why do you have then to police what others such as
efficient to let them get on with it, since reality as such is an impossible,
unthinkable, unspeakable affair? After all, these guys are only making
them?
The trouble is, you don't believe me because I'm a humanities guy, so
if I say reality qua me and you and this cup of coffee over here doesn't
really exist, I'm some kind of nihilistic deconstructor or (worse) a New Age
whacko in academic drag, while my colleague in the physics building can get
hole—that the extent to which we exist is not unlike the extent to which
the implicate order. Images taken with a lens give us a sense of single, solid,
independent things that can be “captured,” as they say, separate from other
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patterns created by light waves bouncing off the object to be imaged and
light waves passing through a beam splitter. When you pass light through
appears in front of the pattern. Weirdly, you can cut a little piece of
hologram out—or shine light through a little piece of the pattern (same
thing), and you will still see a (slightly more blurry) version of the whole
imaged object. Every piece of the hologram contains information about the
whole thing. Bohm argues that this must be the case with reality as such—
every piece of it enfolds information about the whole. Bohm means the
interesting to see how current physical models also think about holograms
more literally. Recent results from gravity wave detectors have revealed a
that “Here” and “there” are superficial labels. Thus “myself,” located here
opposed to “climate.” In truth, then, we are “in” something (if “in” has any
meaning here) that has no center or edge. We are certainly not pieces in a
jigsaw puzzle that's larger than all of us put together. This kind of view,
known as holism, means that there is a whole greater than the sum of its
parts. This holistic whole remains separate from its parts in some sense.
The holistic jigsaw puzzle view depends upon an outside and an inside, and
jigsaw pieces whose external edges are related to one another like
Let's just pop the love and light balloon right here. The trouble with
the holographic view is that it's bad for holism as well as for atomism. You
are not part of a larger whole: you are that whole, directly. This means that
there is, again, no background against which our thinking makes sense. This
with: it is utterly singular, which means that it can never violently express
everything, which means that at this level (if “level” is the right word here),
can do, limits that Derrida himself did not respect? Derrida didn't say, late
in life, “Oh well, ho hum, might as well throw in the towel; nothing means
throw in the quantum towel and go “Ho hum, can't make anything of that,
never mind, pass the salt,” like the physicist who said that his experiences in
the lab were hermetically sealed from his everyday experiences of life. The
the refusal to think beyond a certain limit, and contempt for those who
try). It's been my general experience that you can say almost anything in the
academy, but if you say something love and lighty, you get creamed. My
question as to why the left dropped the ball on ecology in the 60s was
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regularly answered with “Well, ecology was a hippie thing” (and thus
beneath contempt).
level that Bohm hypothesizes is very much this play of difference. It would
holism, which Bohm directly critiques as yet another conceptual box. Bohm
is always tentative and subjunctive about the implicate order; but let's
assume that he isn't, or that this tentativeness isn't relevant (it is relevant, in
fact, because Bohm, having discovered the implicate order, realizes that at
it). The “it is unspeakable” is not a taboo against speaking of something that
is so essential that words slip off it; you can speak of it all you like, just
shading around the outline of a form to make the form appear on paper.
New Age appropriation of Bohm, and academic prejudices against New Age
(some valid, some less so): the naive optimism of New Age dies a death in
develop a view that is congruent with our ethical and political needs—we
can drop the manipulativeness, but on academia's side, the critical attitude,
which too often is only a legitimated form of cynicism, can also be dropped.
with one's environment, and so on. At the very moment at which it has
talk about objects in precisely the same way. I find this more than strange.
danger and absurdity press every ideology warning light on your control
subject.
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Houses, and works for “justly tuned” instruments. These works are very,
very long, very simple from the point of view of narrative—they have no
beginning, middle or end, but rather are just tones, and vocal or
created by precisely tuned sine waves, using in Young's case whole number
It's like going inside matter, as if the shiny ping-pong balls were hugely
to materiality (of the breath and of one's body—in Sanskrit this tuning is
how subject and object are deeply entangled, just as, when one looks at
Bridget Riley, one is seeing one's own optical system. “Drift Study,” for
around them—you are hearing your ears. This kind of thing immediately
any attempt to think outside the Marxist box, they land you in a hippie-
looking place. The question is, do we scholars then run away, like Scooby
and Shaggy?