Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence by Timothy Morton (review)

Timothy Morton's latest project, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, argues that our present environmental crisis is indebted to more than just capitalism, fossil fuels, and modernity. "Dark ecology," a form of awareness first introduced in Morton's Ecology Without Nature (2007), offers a method for attuning oneself to the complexities of ecological reality in order to combat the simplified logics that have led, Morton argues, to the Anthropocene. While Morton's 'weird' and playful style might frustrate some (in this book, the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning, recalling T.S. Eliot), this formal experimentation reflects the loop-like eco-logic that must be cultivated if we care at all about the future of humans and nonhumans on this earth.

Dark Ecology broadens ecocritical scholarship by shifting the focus from the Anthropocene to agrilogistics, Morton's designation for the past 12,000 years. Agrilogistics denotes both the period beginning with Mesopotamia and agriculture in the Fertile Crescent and the logic produced by this shift from nomadic to place-based living. Morton refutes short-term explanations of how and why humans caused the Anthropocene, claiming that they are merely symptomatic of a deeper, older, set of assumptions that are based on a faulty ontology. According to Morton, the "logistics" behind this agricultural venture are what eventually determined and required the invention of the steam engine. It is agrilogistics, not merely capitalism, that is "the smoking gun behind the smoking chimneys responsible for the Sixth Mass Extinction Event" (43). Morton seeks to replace the anthropocentric logic of the past 12,000 years with ecognosis, a type of knowing akin to ecological awareness. Morton describes ecognosis as "Knowing in a loop—a weird knowing," the antithesis of an agrilogistical knowledge that is based on linearity, boundaries, and consistency (5). Ecognosis seems more like the type of knowledge produced by poetry, which allows for and even thrives on contradictions.

The aim of this project is thus precisely what the subtitle states: to replace agrilogistics with a logic of coexistence. Agrilogistics consists of three axioms that must be addressed in order to counteract the ecological threats of the Anthropocene:

(1) The Law of Noncontradiction is inviolable.
(2) Existing means being constantly present.
(3) Existing is always better than any quality of existing.

(47)

According to Morton, this first axiom—that opposites cannot be true at the same time—has resulted in a system of thought based on harmful and rigid boundaries: humans vs. nonhumans, 'productive' life forms vs. pests. This system requires and perpetuates an essentialism based on the second axiom: "a metaphysics of presence" (48) that transforms dynamic relationships and beings into static, quantifiable data. The third axiom describes the focus on accumulating quantities without regard for the resulting quality of existence. To find alternatives to such narrow and anti-ecological thinking, Morton argues: "We are going to have to rethink what a thing is. We require a Difficult Think Thing […] the weird might be a helpful ontological category" (65). Drawing on the work of French philosopher and feminist Luce Irigaray, Morton proposes a weird essentialism: "while beings are what they are (essentialism) they are not constantly present" (65). Constancy and consistency, Morton shows, are the enemies of ecology: "If you want ecological things to exist—ecological things like humans, meadows, frogs, and the biosphere—you have to allow them to violate the logical 'Law' of Noncontradiction" (73).

Morton, who identifies as a correlationalist, accepts "Kant's basic argument that when I try to find the thing in itself, what I find are thing data, not the thing in itself" (16), though he modifies Kant's position to include nonhumans. That nonhuman beings can experience the inaccessibility of things is critical for Morton's vision of co-existence. This nonanthropocentric weird correlationalism contends that while things may only exist in meaningful ways in certain contexts, this does not mean that things do not exist just...