We require toy political forms

Intellect is indeed an organ of extinction and that is not great. You can't snicker triumphantly about that. Like all autoimmune systems, intellectuality-depression reinforces itself. How does one sub-vert a self-reinforcing loop? To cast intellect away would be the absurd anti-intellectualism that is part of the problem, trying to return to some state of Nature defined by stripping "civilization" of its symbionts: intellect, plastic, cancer; and, beyond this, stripping the very loop form that provides the structure for beings. This is absurd because "civilization" is already agrilogistic scorched earth and retreat with the nonhumans airbrushed out. Stripping the human realm of its symbionts is... agrilogistics.

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An ecological politics based on guilt underlies "return to Nature" tactics. Basing politics on horror necessitates some kind of resignation tinged with Schadenfreude, wide-eyed and screaming while Rome burns. What mainly impedes ecognosis is the deadly seriousness; we require toy political forms that don't take themselves quite as seriously. A lifeform, an engineering solution, a social policy, another lifeform – they join together and become another type of toy, in a sort of ecological Lego. Not as models for some future serious form. Why? Because of interdependence, there's always a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle. There can never be The Toy, one toy to rule them all. Attempts to impose one system top down ahve consistently failed to feed as many people as a variety of smaller scale approaches.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 140-141

Death is the fact that ecological thought must encounter

A rigid and thin concept of Life is what dark ecology rejects. That concept can only mean one thing: all three axioms of agrilogistics are in play. Life is the ultimate noncontradictory Easy Think Substance that we must have more and more of, for no reason. A future society in which being ecological became a mode of violence still more horrifying than the neoliberalism that now dominates Earth would consist of a vigorous insistence on Life and related categories such as health.  It would make the current control society (as Foucault calls it) look like an anarchist picnic. If that is what future coexistnce means, beam me up Scotty. The widescreen view of dark ecology sees lifeforms as specters in a charnel ground in which Life is a narrow metaphysical concrete pipe. Death is the fact that ecological thought must encounter to stay soft, to stay weird.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 137-138

Reason reveals itself a little bit nonhuman

The basic mode of ecological awareness is anxiety, the feeling that things have lost their seemingly original significance, the feeling that something creepy is happening, close to home. Through anxiety reason itself begins to glimpse what indigenous – that is, preagricultural – societies have known all along: that humans coexist with a host of nonhumans. For reason itself reveals itself to be at least a little bit nonhuman. In turn, reason discovers global warming, the miasma for which humans are responsible. Through reason we find ourselves not floating blissfully in outer space, but caught like Jonah in the whale of a gigantic object, the biosphere. Such an object is not reducible to its members, not its members to it; it is a set whose members are not strictly coterminous with itself.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.130

To exist is to coexist

Depression is the inner footprint of coexistence, a highly sensitive attunement to other beings, a feeling of being sensitized to a plenitude of things. De-pressed by them. So we don't want to reject the logical structure of consumerism. Enjoy a thing just for the taste of it. By listening to it rather than sadistically treating it as silent plastic. Ecognosis means: letting become more susceptible.

Melancholy is irreducible because it's ecological; there is no way out of abjection because of symbiosis and interdependence. To exist is to coexist. Yet this coexistence is suffused with pleasure, pleasure that appears perverse from the standpoint of the subject under the illusion that it has stripped the abjection from itself. Down below abjection, ecological awareness is deeply about pleasure.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.129

To be a thing is to be nonsensical

Awareness of ourselves as another "nonhuman" entity has to do with our knowledge, now including logical proofs, that even our thoughts and logical systems evade us. Despite our intentions, they have a life of their own, which means, despite our fantasies that they are totally coherent, they are in fact fragile, like lifeforms. To be a logical system is to be able to speak nonsense because to be a thing is to be nonsensical. Ecognosis has to do with allowing for this nonsensical, pestiferous dimension of things. A thought, a lizard, a spoon veer from themselves. To be a thing is to be a deviation. A thing, a thought, a sentence are per-ver-se. An en-vir-onment is not a closed circle but a veering loop. A thing is in a loop with itself: a thing and a thing-pattern, asymmetrical, which is why there can be patterns at all – which is why there can be replication. Which is why there can be organic chemicals, lifeforms, and sentences about patterns.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.96

Sense must coexist with nonsense

Sense must coexist with nonsense, its shadow. A thing is shadowed by another thing because it's shadowed by itself. Recursion points to coexistence in a nonholistic, not-all (which is to say ecological) possibility space. Metalanguages try to escape this possibility space, to reduce the paradox of coexisting: we entail one another and are not one another. Plants, specters, and hallucinations return more vividly when you try to prune them. To distinguish thought from nonsense is like taking a lifeform out of its habitat.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.91

A human is a heap of things that aren't humans

Since a human is a heap of things that aren't humans, just as a meadow is a heap of things that aren't meadows, such as grasses and birds, either ecological and biological beings don't really exist or there's a malfunction in the logic we have rather uncritically inherited from Aristotle. A malfunction, moreover, that is beginning to distort political decisions at scales appropriate for thinking global warming. If we relax our grip, we can allow for sets of things that don't sum to a whole, and this just is what we have when we think geological temporality as a series of nested sets of catastrophes.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.75

Nature as such is a twleve-thousand-year-old human product

The ecological value of the term Nature is dangerously overrated, because Nature isn't just a term – it's something that happened to human-built space, demarcating human systems from Earth systems. Nature as such is a twelve-thousand-year-old human product, geological as well as discursive. Its wavy elegance was eventually revealed as inherently contingent and violent, as when in a seizure one's brain waves become smooth. Wash-rinse-repeat the agrilogistics and suddenly we reach a sipping point.

The Anthropocene doesn't destroy Nature. The Anthropocene is Nature in its toxic nightmare form. Nature is the latent form of the Anthropocene waiting to emerge as catastrophe.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 58-59

The anture-culture split is the result of a nature-agriculture split

The humanistic analytical tools we currently possess are not capable of functioning at a scale appropriate to agrilogistics because they are themselves compromised products of agrilogistics. The nature-culture split we persist in using is the result of a nature-agriculture split (colo, cultum pertains to growing crops). This split is a product of agrilogistic subroutines, establishing the necessarily violent and arbitrary difference between itself and what it "conquers" or delimits. Differences aside, the confusions and endlessly granular distinctions arising therefrom remain well within agrilogistic conceptual space.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p. 43

You are already living on more than one timescale

You are already living on more than one timescale. Ecological awareness is disorienting precisely because of these multiple scales. We sense that there are monsters even if we can't see them directly.

There's a monster in the dark mirror, and you are a cone in one of its eyes. When you are sufficiently creeped out by the human species, you see something even bigger than the Anthropocene looming in the background, hiding in plain sight in the prose of Thomas Hardy, the piles of fruit in the supermarket, the gigantic parking lots, the suicide rate.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 41-42

Prove that I have imagination

Prove that I have imagination as a human being. Prove that I'm not executing an algorithm. more to the point, prove that my idea that I'm not executing an algorithm isn't just the variety of algorithm that I've been programmed to execute.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p. 31

Place is a twist you can't iron out of the fabric of things

Place has a strange loop form because place deeply involves time. Place doesn't stay still, but bends and twists: place is a twist you can't iron out of the fabric of things. When you are near your destination you can sometimes feel quite disoriented. You may enhance the magnification on Google Maps to make sure you are really there. The local is far from the totally known or knowable. It is familiar, which also mean that it is uncanny (German heimisch, "familiar" and "unfamiliar", "intimate" and "monstrous" at the same time).

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p. 11

Space has collapsed and placed has emerged in its truly monstrous uncanny dimension

We have been telling ourselves that homogenous empty "space" has conquered localized, particular "place". We are either the kind of person who thinks that the category of place is a quaint antique or we are the kind of person who thinks that the category is worth preserving because it is antique. In a certain way, we are the same kind of person.

Many have pronounced the death of place since the 1970s. In literary studies the announcement has gone hand in hand with the language of textuality versus speech. Our habitual talk pits speech (presence, villages, the organic, slow time, traditions) against textuality (dissolution, speed, modern, and postmodern technocultures). Yet the coordinates are terribly out of date. In a twist no one saw coming (because we weren't looking outside the human), space has by no means conquered place. That postmodern meme was simply a late symptom of the modern myth of transcending one's material conditions.

Exactly the opposite has occurred. From the standpoint of the genuinely post-modern ecological era, what has collapsed is (the fantasy of empty, smooth) space. "Space" has revealed itself as the convenient fiction of white Western imperialist humans, just as relativity theory revealed Euclidean geometry to be a small human-flavored region of a much more liquid Gaussian spacetime. The Euclidean concept that space is a container with straight lines is good enough to be getting on with if you want to voyage around the coast of Africa to reach the Spice Islands. Space in this sense has collapsed, and place has emerged in its truly moonstrous uncanny dimension, which is to say its nonhuman dimension. How? Now that the globalization dust has settled and the global warming data is in, we humans find ourselves on a very specific planet with a specific biosphere. It's not Mars. It is planet Earth. Our sense of planet is not a cosmopolitan rush but rather the uncanny feeling that there are all kinds of places at all kinds of scale: dinner table, house, street, neighborhood, Earth, biosphere, ecosystem, city, bioregion, country, tectonic plate. Moreover and perhaps more significantly: bird's nest, beaver's dam, spider web, whale migration pathway, wolf territory, bacterial microbiome. And these places, as in the concept of spacetime, are inextricably bound up with different kinds of timescale: dinner party, family generation, evolution, climate (human) "world history", DNA, lifetime, vacation, geology; and again the time of wolves, the time of whales, the time of bacteria.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 9-10