Show Us Your Papers!

7/21/2019 Show Us Your Papers!

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Show Us Your Papers!

Tim Morton

According to an argument in a recent issue of Critical Inquiry, either you are

into feminism, critical race studies, postcolonial theory and so onor you

are into speculative realism. The choice is simple. You're either with the

those things, or your against them (sound familiar?). In other words, you're

either with the New Leftthe Perry Anderson-fueled intellectual

movement that grew in the later 60s and 70s and ended up flourishing as

the theory class in the humanities part of academiaor you're against it.

Against it meaning you are into speculative realism, or indeed, ecology

because as an actual contributor to New Left Review told me a few years

ago, the movement dropped the ball on ecology because It was a hippie

thing.

So on both accounts, I'm pretty evil, which is why Verso, the actual

press of the actual New Left, have just asked me to publish a book with

themwait a minute.

Of course, I'm going to argue that you can be as pro-feminist and

what have you as you like andbe keen on speculative realism andindeed


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ecology. You had better be, otherwise I need to resign or something. At

least I had better stop bugging Irigaray to endorse my new book.

But let's assume that Critical Inquiryis right. In what does my evil

consist? Well, first of all I assert that there is a reality that is not just a

human constructof course I'm making a generalization here that itself is

bad, bad, bad universalistic bourgeois shittery, because I'm saying human

as opposed to say discursiveor ideological, and I'm saying human as

opposed to sayAmericanor Western or whiteor what have you.

Saying things like humanwith gay abandon are exactly what has

recently gotten me and Dipesh Chakrabarty into so much trouble. We are

now kind of banned from a number of postcolonial theory type journals, for

saying things like species. Maybe that's what we will focus on here, then, the

notion of species, the elephant in the roomor rather the human in the

room, if you know what I mean. Dipesh and I are bad bad universalistic

wrong people because we think that humans as a species have become a

geophysical force on a planetary scaleor, even though we all know that

now because we keep on saying the wordAnthropocene, we don't critique it

enough, I mean we assert that Indians would really like air conditioning, and

stuff. I am proud, evilly proud, that I for one will never ever write anything


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critical about the Anthropos of the Anthropocene and so on. And that

makes me a very bad person.

But this is straying too much and too soon into ecological ethics and

politics and I think you'd like me to talk about the really big bad elephant,

the speculative realism elephant, and in particular, the object-oriented

elephant. The ontological elephant. For heavens sake I say the word ontology

and get away with it, like the Enlightenment never happened! What's wrong

with me?

I must be some kind of peasant clodhopper. If I'm the kind of person

who can't even understand that you just can't say ontologyin polite circles, if

I don't even get the consequences of the age of Hume and Kant, I'm

basically not even clever enough to understand why you should be pro-

feminism or queer theory or critical race studies. I'm a knuckle-dragging

thug, and my unfortunate genetic trait of having a y chromosome isn't

making the optics any better either. I'm getting sick of these boys: actual

quotation about speculative realists heard at actual conferenceand that

was back in 2012! Which would be why Jane Bennnett is so opposed to

oh wait a minute again.

What's more, as an OOO proponent, I have the temerity to ignore a

basic unwritten rule of polite New Left speech: statements about what is


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the case must always come bundled in some way with an easy to identify

(to enable me to relax because I know whether or not you are on my side)

political coding of some kind or other. This ignoring of the rule must be

tantamount, according to the rule adherents, to not having a politics at all,

which must be tantamount to supporting the status quo. I am a neoliberal

bastard who doesn't even have the decency to disguise the fact. As Prince

Farquad says in Shrek, it's bad enough being ugly when no one likes you, but

to interrupt polite conversation with stuff about spoons and quasars is just

the pits.

And it gets worse! Since politics and ethics are about relations, and I

think that objects subtend their relations, I'm saying that there are some

things that aren't political. In fact I must be saying that politics isn't that

important!

Now thenhold onkeep your hair on as they say. This is where

we can start talking a bit more carefully. If you are claiming that politics

can't be important because it's epiphenomenal, it means that you, yourself,

have an implicit ontologyand not a great one at that. Ha! Put thatin your

pipe and smoke it, Mr. I'm going to ferret out your implicit stuff and use it

against you! How do you like that, Mr. Ontology is for medieval peasants?


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If you think that phenomena, the realm of appearance, is somehow

less good than the realm of reality, which is kidn of what you're implying if

you think my claim that politics are about relations is a disastrous limitation,

then you are cleaving to a default ontology that has been in effect for the

last 12 000 years, formalized in Aristotle's substance-and-accidents

ontology and retweeted in most subsequent dominant Western

philosophies such as Descartes, including even the views of Kant despite

himself, Kant who strove to do away with medieval peasantry for good and

plant us firmly in epistemology world, no ontology please, we're modern

Europeans.

You are cleaving, what you have read in Derrida aside, to the

metaphysics of presence, which asserts that some things are more real than

other things, and the way in which they are more real is that they are more

constantly present. Phenomena are fleeting and superficial, while actual

things are constantly there beneath phenomena. Actual things are basically

bland lumps of extension decorated with accidents. How's that been

working out, incidentally, in an ecological sense, since we started using it in

the Mesopotamia circa 10 000 BCE? Like, it doesn't matter what I do to

this field, it will remain constantly beneath appearances, even if right now


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the appearance is of a desertneed I say more, right here right now, in

Berkeley California?

Never mind that you claimreality is a social construct, or a positing

of a subject, or an effect of Will, or a product of will to power, or a

structure of human economic relations, or a destining of Dasein. What you

are actually implyingis the default Western metaphysical substance, which I

sometimes call the Easy Think Substance, because it resembles what comes

out of an Easy Bake Oven: some kind of extension lump that you can

decorate with sprinkles if you like.

I bet you still write grant applications like Please, please, give me this

little bit of money to study the sprinkles, the human sprinkles, or decorate

this boring scientistic cupcake with some nice sprinkles, you know, the

human meaning of it all, even though I know it's trivial and insignificant and I

basically act intellectually like I agree with Kristin Dunst inMelancholia, that

there is no life out that and that we're a small, slightly pathetic decoration

on a gigantic universe cupcake at this pointplease don't get rid of my

department right now, I really am important, I mean I could go on NPR and

tell more people about the sprinkles, please please. When push comes to

shove, I bet you that's what you are likely to say, when you actually want

some money to fund something.


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I bet you don't say what I am now saying quite a lot, which is that if

you think about it it's science that does appearance. We do reality. Science

does data: appearance, phenomena. It is enjoined never ever to make

ontological statements about appearances, only to find patterns in data,

correlations that might amount to causality, but because I, the scientist, am

interpreting it this way. Science, modern science, is Humean in this respect.

It adheres to the strictures of Hume, who argues that you just can't see

cause and effect, you just can't point to them metaphysically, all you can see

are patterns in data. Science, far from being the steminteresting

agricultural image, not very nice to flowers and the DNA that flowers are

responsible for sharing that actually causes things like stems to exist at all,

but never mindis more like the flower, in this respect. It's the humanities

that stick up for what I myself take to be reality, not a boring scientistic

extension lump, but the palpable yet unspeakable and ungraspable futurality

or openness or what have you of things. The fact that there is justice, but

that every time I try to describe it, I am only giving an example of justice

(Plato). Or that there is forgiveness, but only because forgiveness is strictly

impossible since the ultimate forgiveness would be to forgive the

unforgiveable (Derrida). Or that there are lifeforms, but that when we look

for them, we can't distinguish them in a rigid way (my idea of the strange


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stranger, derived from Derrida's idea of the arrivant, in other words, how

hospitality depends on welcoming the being who cannot be welcomed.)

But first things first. How come ontology should be normative at all?

How come saying things about what is the case should imply an easy to

identify plan for how to act or coexist? Isn't that a bit coercive? It has often

struck me that way, when in the Q&A I am often asked What is the

politics of OOO? or indeed in the ecology seminar I'm asked what we are

supposed to do. This is often what happens in intellectual circlesit's guilt

and anxiety about having an intellect, which often happens most acutely at

about 4pm, which is when the roundtable usually is. So usually I say

something true, but a bit cute, like well, I'm paid to make you think and

hesitate, and those are politically useful just think about Benjamin and his

thing about socialism being pulling the emergency brake, or Adorno's

incredible critique of the concept of progress.

On the other hand, saying that reflection and hesitation are

themselves ethical and political acts is true, but also can be a bit of a cop

out. So over the years I have figured out that there is indeed a politics of

OOO, at least in my book, and a politics of ecological philosophy, and that

they overlap, and that the name of this politics is roughly anarchism. Which

would be the real reason why OOO isn't quite welcome at the New Left


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party, in the same way that anarchism wasn't welcome at the First

International. I truly think that reality is an anarchyso the most

appropriate politics with regard to this fact would be anarchism. Let's break

it down in a way that tries not to be too trivial.

Let's get back to something I said a bit earlier about whether OOO

understands the last two hundred years of philosophy, and let's make it

quite clear that I doget the consequences of the age of Hume and Kant. It's

just that how I get it isn't your granddaddy's way of getting it. I'm totally

happy with the idea that you can't access the real directly, that what you

get when you open the fridge to see whether or not the light is on is an

inevitably anthropomorphicin the largest sense, not deliberate or

intended or what have you but just because I am shrinkwrapped in

whatever my phenomenological style is, let's just call it humanto be a bit

neoliberal and generalizing and bourgeois and shittywhat I get is an

anthropomorphic translation of the interior of that fridge.

It's just that as a proponent of OOO I'd like it if we could allow frogs

to be able to correlate the world in their froggy way, or spoons in their

spoony way, such that there is nothing special about my

anthropomorphizing it. My anthropomorphizing the world, in other words,

doesn't have to be anthropocentric, and it's anthropocentrism that's the


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problem, one of the things that make OOO very attractive for ecological

philosophy. Since anthropomorphism is on my definition inevitable

because I'm not in charge of my phenomenological styleit's not the

problem. The problem is my human-centered copyright control over

correlating the world, opening the fridge, being the Decider, as George

Bush would say, goo goo ga joob.

Your granddaddy's way of getting Hume and Kant was to emphasize

the truth of the correlation aspect of what they were arguingthe Decider

part. And to anthropocentrize it. For Kant, the correlator is the

transcendental subject. Numerous substitutes developed in the last two

centuries: history, Geist, Will, Will to Power, human economic relations,

the unconscious, Dasein, discursive formations, dispositifs, ideologynow

you can begin to see why the New Left has had problems with us lot. We

are stressing another aspect of the Hume and Kant consensus, the fact that

there are indeed things, which cannot be known in themselves. The reason

why humans have to open fridges to find out things about their insides is

because there really are fridges. We are sticking up for the fridges of this

world, is all. At least in part.

Now the trouble is that most Deciders, most correlators, turn out

to be retweets of the default substance ontology, in a sophisticated new


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guise. And this is the deeper reason why OOO has had trouble: we have

pointed out something rather embarrassing, namely how far though hasn't

come since Aristotle, despite all the self-positing subjects, despite all the

overminingas we like to call it. We just reduce objects upwards rather than

downwardsor if we are some kinds of new materialist we might even

have regressed to reducing objects downwards again, to undermining them,

by asserting that they are extrusions of some universal physical flux,

because flowing things are cooler than static things, at least for now

Even Kant wasn't ready to go all the way down the rabbit hole of his

own intuition, which is that there are, for instance, raindropsthey fall on

my head, they are wet, cold, raindroppyyet whenever I try to point to

them, what I find is raindrop data, not actual raindrops. I find coldness,

wetness, spherical-ness and so on. But these things are raindrops, not

gumdrops, what a shame but there you go. What this really means is that

there is no dotted line on a raindrop telling you where to separate the

raindrop thing from the raindrop data. The raindrop appearance and the

raindrop actuality are deeply, irreducibly entangled, yet different. It's like

the twist in a Mbius strip: the twist is everywhere, you can't localize it,

which is why topology calls such things non-orientable surfaces. They have

no top or bottom, no inside or outside, and so on. The business of finding


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the dotted line is call the metaphysics of presence, and until deconstruction,

most Western philosophy has been pretty keen, consciously or not, to find

that dotted line. Plato for instance uses a telling agricultural image, a lump

of butcher's meat, and says that a philosopher must know how to cut the

eidos just as a skillful butcher knows how to cut a joint of meat. But what

Kant discovered is that you can't separate the meat of the raindrop from

the bone of the raindrop.

So even Kant freaks out and invents a constantly present

transcendental subject who mathematizes stuff to do the correlating, to

make things real. And therefore, since mathematization means calculating

pre-existing extensional objects, some kind of default Easy Think ontology

is smuggled in behind the sophisticated, overmining concept of that

correlating subject. And so on throughout the last two hundred years.

Perhaps the weirdest it ever got was Heidegger, who at least tries to

destructure (Destruktion, whence deconstruction) the metaphysical impulse,

but tends to end up saying that German Dasein is the best correlator of

them all, the best butcher. German lumps. The extension of the

Lebensraum of German lumps in as many directions as possible.

There's a related problem, which is that if you emphasize the Decider

part of the correlationist equation, you tend to think that you can do


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anything to anything. Since there are no actual light bulbs, only light bulb

discourses, then maybe you can treat an octopus like a light bulb. Since

there is no quantum world, as the Standard quantum theoretical Model

version of correlationism states, everything becomes malleableso get me

a huge grant so I can nano-transform this lectern into a lump of beef. Again

you are treating the world as if it were just plastic extension lumps. And

since you don't believe like Aristotle did in final or formal causes, you see

those lumps in an even more sadistic way as waiting to be formatted in

whatever way the Decider sees fit.

Heidegger was thinking that the problem started with Plato, roughly,

but he was thousands of years off, as far as I'm concerned. The problem

started with Mesopotamians (and others in China and Central and South

America) who were (1) anxious about where their next meal was coming

from in a era when Earth was heating up and (2) ontologically anxious

about the fundamental ambiguity suggested by the entanglement of things

with their appearance, and the resulting fundamental paranoia common to

indigenous cultures, in which you might be a witch, or under a spell, or that

bunny rabbit might be a demon, or not, but it's really almost impossible to

know for sure. A paranoia that could, in the grand scheme of things, be

very funnya comical ontology where things are never as they appear but


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never other than they actually are at the very same time, constantly

deviating from themselves and thereby being exactly themselves, which just

is this constant deviation, like circles or self-referential sentences such as

This sentence is false. Such things are both true and false at the same time,

which means that to tolerate them you have to tolerate violating the (never

proved) law of noncontradiction and its nephew, the law of the excluded

middle, those cornerstones of most Western logic.

The fact that this indigenous way of seeing is now freely available to

anyone who thinks through the implications and discoveries of

contemporary science, including global warming science, is a delicious irony,

that one day we will laugh at, once we have stopped crying tragically about

having been caught in a loop for the last twelve thousand years, never

having left Mesopotamia in any meaningful sense, the short version of that

history beingIn order to avoid global warming, humans created worse global

warming, which sounds like how Oedipus tried to avoid killing his dad by

running away to a place where in a fit of road rage he killed his dad, and so

on. Tragedythe endless cultural computation of the agricultural logistics

that arose in the Fertile Crescent.

Tragedy, with its nascently Axial Age theism of overarching destinies

too big to fathom, gigantic beings that are bigger than the sum of their


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parts, which makes most contemporary academic views of neoliberalism

into variants of monotheismthis huge, big bad overarching system that

we can't possibly defeat, woe is me, so we had better just allow it to

accelerate and reveal its contradictions, while wiping us pathetic humans off

the face of Earth.

On the other hand, consider a small German town, which cuts itself

off from the neoliberal energy grid and starts to produce its own power.

Maybe the trouble is that it's too easy to subvert neoliberalism. You can

just turn it off at the pipe, and install your own little solar array or

whatever. I know, I know, it's not going to change everything. But can

anything change everything? Once you accept that things are

interconnected, it's also true that ethics and politics are always hamstrung

by some kind of hypocrisy. Being nice to bunny rabbits means not being

nice to bunny rabbit parasites. You can't get it all completely right all at

once. Total solutions just don't work. So you end up being an ontologized

version of some kind of early 70s postmodern thinker, for whom things are

games, contingent, limited, ironically incapable of grasping everything. It's

just that you are no longer simply claiming this in an epistemological sense,

you are claiming it in an ontological sense. So your politics now gets even

lamer looking: apparently we found the exit route from modernity in the


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early 70s but because of the inertia of the academic marketplace or

whatever, we went on burrowing way past it. What I'm saying about

spoons and galaxies is very much what Irigaray is saying about the being she

calls Woman, that a thing cannot be reduced to a one or a two, that it is an

inherently untotalizable, multiple being whose appearance is inextricable

from what it is in a way that defies most Western logic, but is nevertheless

perfectly logical and thinkable in another sense.

Ethical and political solutions are always necessarily loose and fragile

affilations of humans and nonhumans, even when they are pretending not to

be. So let's just do that deliberately. Let's get together a small reading group

in this room with some polar bears and this cat and those trees, and see

what happens. Maybe it will fizzle out after just a week. So there have to be

lots and lots of ethical and political solutions, there can be no one solution

to rule them all, which again begins to look like anarchism, although that

word is itself a totalizing term invented to pathologize numerous quite

discontinuous and varied beliefs. Political and ethical solutions have a

necessarily playful, toy-like quality. Play is a fundamental category of being,

since a thing is what it is, yet is never as it appears, which is what my cat

says when she nips me, as we learn from Gregory Bateson: This is a bite and

this is not a bite. Political models, social forms, ethical decisions are all to


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some extent silly. The overwhelming grey seriousness with which we are

supposed to think these things is part of the problem.

Especially in an age in which technical functioning for its own sake is

valued at the expense of everythingjust think of something local to

universities, the success of engineering and writing programs at the expense

of everything elseit seems important to emphasize play rather than

reality. To this extent, OOO isn't about reality at all. If reality means

getting used to acephalic technical functioning and damn the torpedoes

and the droughts and the mass extinctionthen beam me up, Scotty.

Because that kind of reality is based on an implicit ontology of bland

extension lumps in which I can sadistically do anything to anything, because

those lumps don't exist in a meaningful sense until the Decider has

formatted them.

But you can't do anything to everything, and for a deep ontological

reason. Because appearance is deeply entwined with what things are, things

exist in contradiction with themselves, and are thus intrinsically fragile, such

that even a black hole, literally the densest object in the universe that

nothing can touch without being sucked in, evaporates as it emits more and

more Hawking radiation. Things are intrinsically disabled, as it were. They

halt. Which would be a Turing-esque way of saying something OOO, and


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this isn't an accident, since to prove Gdel's incompleteness theorem,

Turing invented hypothetical physical machines that could pretend to be

any other physical machine, just like your computer can pretend to be a

piece of paper or a guitar. There is no machine powerful enough to predict

whether or when all other machines will go into an infinite loop. Which is a

physical way of saying that in order to be true on its own terms, a logical

system must be able to talk nonsense. Which is a very rigorous way of

saying that computation to happen, there have to be sets of things that

contain things that aren't members of them. Which is a detailed way of

saying that in order to have raindrops, you can't have actual raindrops.

Turing's proof is an intuition about objects in general that OOO extends

and develops.

So, coexistence means things not interfering with the fragility of

other things. Being-with in fragility. Coexistence is necessarily nonviolent.

That sounds like the beginning of an ethics and a politics to me. Because

existing meaning coexisting, even just with myself. Since I don't quite

coincide with myself, even in total isolation, existing is coexisting. Notice

how this is paradoxically different from saying that things are defined by

their relations. This relationism usually means that Easy Think Things are

networked together in something more interesting. What I'm saying is quite


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the opposite, strangely. In an absolute vacuum, close to absolute zero, you

would notice how I don't coincide with myself, a fact that is now

demonstrably of objects billions of times larger than a single particle, the

traditional (Standard Model) quantum unit. You would notice how I am a

loop or a circulation, shimmering without mechanical input. You can put

that on my gravestone by the way, if I die in the next few minutes. Things

shimmer without mechanical input. If you wanted to reduce my ontology to

one sentence, it would be that.

Now we can reconsider the concept speciesin light of this, which I

am calling weird essentialism. Again, it's an untheoretical, because

unexamined, premise of theory 101 that to appear not an idiot you have to

diss essentialism. Like Irigaray, I am some kind of essentialist, and also like

her, I think that the way things are is not quite to coincide with themselves.

This is an untried fourth position in a logic square of ontological positions

since Kant: essentialism minus the metaphysics of presence. We have had

essentialist plus the metaphysics of presencebasic scientistic atomism or

flux ontologies. We have had nonessentialism minus the metaphysics of

presencethe correlationisms popular in Continental philosophy and thus

in theory class. Have had had nonessentialism minus the metaphysics of

presencedeconstruction, which has the merit of doing no metaphysical


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harm by refraining from ontological statements tout court. So let's give the

fourth position a whirl.

According to the fourth position, essentialism minus the metaphysics

of presence, species is now thinkable as a weird, fragile whole that isn't

quite the sum of its parts. Which turns out to be biologically correct. In

order to be human I need a lot more nonhuman DNA in the shape of my

bacterial microbiome than I need human DNA. Species has become truly

thinkable right now, at the point at which we can see how symbiosis is a

deep fact about lifeforms, and at the point at which we can see how

humans are members of a hyperobject, the human species, that is directly

responsible for global warming, and that there is a gap between little me

who starts his car without meaning to harm Earth, and without indeed

harming Earthmy action is statistically meaninglessand the human

species, which starts billions of cars and other carbon emitting devices and

thus causes global warming. A hyperobject being, if you recall, something

you can think or compute, but you can't see or touch it. Thinking that a

species is something you can see or touch is called being a speciesist or

racist. That was what was wrong about Aristotle's concept of final cause

ducks are for swimming, Greeks are for invading barbarians. Ducks aren't

for very much at all, according to evolution theory.


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The fact that things don't coincide with themselves also puts a

serious dent in any form of self-interest theory. Since even my present self

isn't quite me, let alone my future selves, it doesn't make sense to do

actions with reference to my self interest. Indeed, we might see self-

interest based ethical theories as an ethical version of the Easy Think

Substance, sort of Easy Think Ethics. For a certain default utilitarianism,

existing always trumps any quality of existing, so that, for instance, and this

has been one reason why the planet is in quite bad shape, it is always better

to have trillions of humans (I'm saying humans because in effect, screw the

other lifeforms, according to this model) living in a state close to the

zombified Msselmner of Primo Levi's concentration camp than it is to

have billions of humans living in a state of permanent MDMA bliss. Which

seems odd.

We might go about proving this by showing that self-interest theories

only operate on an anthropocentric temporality, and a blinkered one at

that. Imagine an action that took thousands of years to complete.

According to self-interest theory, I would need to live thousands of years

to benefit from this action, and since this is not the case, I shouldn't do the

action. Many ecological actions exist at a temporal scale way beyond one

human lifetime, and they are patently a good idea for me and my


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descendants, so self-interest theory breaks down when you stretch it wide

enough. What about imagining the inverse, a nano-action such as petting a

cat for one nanosecond? I would derive no benefit from such an action. But

since petting a cat for a few seconds is technically made up of such nano-

moments, that kind of action can't be valuable either. Since according to

self-interest theory I am a consistent lump no matter what my appearances,

my actions can be broken down into miniscule temporal parts that should

contain some goodness, or stretched into a vast but still good form. But

they patently don't. We can conclude that self-interest theories are

anthropocentrically wired for a timeframe that probably fits the kind of

Mesopotamian mindset we are still retweeting, where something like a

year, or five if you are a Soviet farmer, is the relevant timeframe.

We can thus conclude something quite astonishing. Not only is

altruism (even the word is loaded) notjust selfish action optimized for large

temporal scales, but since there is no such thingas acting in my self interest

(remember we just reduced that to absurdity) there can be no such thing as

its opposite, acting only with regard to the other, as if the other and how I

should dispose myself towards the other were also an Easy Think Substance

and an Easy Think Ethics.


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In other words, we can find plenty of reasons to do beneficial

ecological actions, for example, that don't need to be explained in terms of

benefiting myself or sacrificing myself. In fact, it's even better. Since we

actually cant' explain them that way at all, we are off the hook. We don't

need to prove that looking after polar bears will be beneficial for future

humans. We can just do it, without needing to prove anything. That's a

pretty strong ethical theory, I feel. Since even just being myself in a vacuum

means coexistence, then it's not right that any old action will satisfy this

kind of intuitionism I'm advocating here. I can't murder things just because I

feel like it. The state of affairs is an uneasy comedy, and it's my job to keep

it that way.

Rice University

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