My PhD Project- Chapter One

My PhD Project: Cinematic Affect in a Time of Ecological Emergency

Chapter One – The Ecological Emergency
The theoretical concerns of this chapter have overlapping interests related to the ecological emergency. The writers are not necessarily in accord as they negotiate these territories, and their critical geneologies and positions often counter each other. These differences in positions provide provocations for thinking and making. Crucially however, it is the point at which their interests overlap that has framed this project’s critical point of view and how these have mediated the practice. As examples: Guattari, Bennett, and Morton each make a critical turn away from historical environmentalisms such as the Romantic, activist, or green consumerist discourses. Bennett, and Morton hone in on Freud’s ‘psychoanalytical’ notion of ‘the uncanny,’ where the familiar is rendered unfamiliar through repression, thus evoking a sense of disorientation “that recalls the helplessness we experience in certain dream-states.”[1] Their concentration is on ‘the uncanny’ in relationship to aesthetics, affect, and/or the strange and weird experience of living in a time of ecological crisis. The key refrain that harnesses these writers’ positions together is the aim of the practice, which is to problematise the ecological subject, in order to agitate a disrupted view of it, to slightly alter the familiar in order to see it again, and to make the invisible visible as a provocation for contemplation.

Throughout this exegesis I refer to theory, contexts, practices, experiences, and moods as, what Deleuze has interchangeably been translated as, mediators or intercessors of practice:

Mediators are fundamental. Creation’s all about mediators. Without

them nothing happens. They can be people – for a philosopher,

artists or scientists; for a scientist, philosophers or artists-but things

too, even plants or animals, as in Castaneda. Whether they’re real or

imaginary, animate or inanimate, you have to form your mediators.[2]

Deleuze is clear that these mediators or intercessors (the preferred translation)[3] are not direct interventions in the thinking and making; in fact it is sometimes in the falsities of their application or in the subjective interpretation of them that another kind of truth emerges. He says of his partnership with Guattari that “each of us falsifies the other, which is to say that each of us understands in his own way notions put forward by the other,” and that it is “these capacities of falsity to produce truth, that’s what mediators are about…”[4] Manning and Massumi interpret Deleuze’s notion of intercessors as “friends” that provide vibrations across the practice in that they are only allies “insofar as [they] contribute to a thinking-feeling tremulously poised on the edge of what cannot quite be thought, felt, said, or painted.”[5] My subjective reading and application of the intercessor, mediator, friend, is how I have approached the theorists, practitioners, and experiences that have traversed the making and thinking through this project. This tactic will become apparent throughout this exegesis, as linkages are made between such philosophically divergent positions as neo-materialist and humanist ones, which in turn are redirected back towards an ontology This chapter navigates philosophical and contextual territories that engage with threats to the ecology, in relationship to concerns and practices traversing this project. The current ecological and social conditions contemplated through the writing situate the underlying political aesthetics framed in the creative outcomes. This project was initiated in response to my own tacit experience of ecological devastation, which induced in me a personal state of melancholy, anxiety, and helplessness, particularly around the complexity of the crisis. I have sought out thinking companions that frame the project from an historical perspective, such as Felix Guattari’s ‘ecosophy’ and those that interrogate current ecological conditions such as Timothy Morton’s ‘ecological thought,’[6] and Jane Bennett’s, ‘vital materialist positions.’[7]

that captures these positions within a politico-ethical-aesthetical encounter with the ecological subject as practice. They are non-linear in their transmissions and unreliable in regards to how and when they emerge from the “outside… felt force[s] that activate the threshold between thinking and feeling.”[8]

From an historical perspective, I position Felix Guattari’s text The Three Ecologies as a stepping-stone to initiate provocations towards discussion. From his point of view, in 1989, the future already looked bleak. Guattari argued that unless profound shifts were made around human engagement with the natural environment and late-capitalist political, economic, and social structures, critical disturbance to the ecology and all life on the planet would be inevitable. “There is at least a risk that there will be no more human history unless humanity undertakes a radical reconsideration of itself.”[9]

Jane Bennett’s vital materialist position considers non-human vitality as an alternate approach for political response to “public problems,” such as threats to our environment.[10] She asks “how, for example, would patterns of consumption change if we faced not litter, rubbish, trash, or ‘the recycling,’ but an accumulating pile of lively and potentially dangerous matter?”[11] Her arguments are framed around notions of impersonal affect or the vibrancy of matter. Most relevant to the concerns of this project are Bennett’s narrative reflections on the affective power or quality of things – “thing-power.” She tunes her focus in this discussion to affective “catalysts” that exist “in non-human bodies,” as a post-environmentalist method of deprioritizing human agency over the vital materiality of things.[12]

Timothy Morton’s ‘Ecological Thought’ posits the end of teleology in the face of the non-human. For him “the end of teleology means the end of the world.” He asks: “what reality is it now that humans now inhabit?”^[13]The argument is framed in a discourse that rejects nature/Nature as a dangerous mythological construction that is well past its use by date. The “aesthetics of Nature truly impedes ecology, [this is] a good argument for why ecology must be without Nature.His reading of the experience of living in the strange present spans ungraspable, or thinkable time, and space.”[14] For Morton there is an opportunity for intimacy in the “inbuilt uncanniness” of his notion of the “strange stranger.” In his more hopeful moments he acknowledges the interconnectedness of all things as “platform for compassion rather than condescending pity.”^[15]

These writers and their arguments act as entry points into situating a position or platform to experiment in the field and in studio. Guattari has been a friend of the project from the outset, while Morton, Bennett and Butler, have made themselves known and threaded their way into the fabric of the making and thinking-making as the project fermented then distilled. Their writings have helped position the practice as a response to the subject of the ecological problem indexically, within moving image works, with an aim to agitate emotional or affective responses from the viewer, as an alternate approach to conventional media productions.

Guattari’s Ecosophy:

The Earth is undergoing a period of intense techno-scientific transformation. If no remedy is found, the ecological disequilibrium this has generated will ultimately threaten the continuation of life on the planet’s surface.[16]

Guattari’s polemic text, The Three Ecologies (1989), implicates the dominant subjectivity of “Integrated World Capitalism” (IWC), also referred to in this document as neoliberalism, as the key cause and barrier to action in confronting issues threatening the Earth’s ecology.[17] He sets up his position through a survey of contemporary, and (predicted) future, environmental and social crises, proposing a need for a dramatic shift in perspective, which he calls “ecosophy,” an “ethico-political articulation” that operates between “three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity.”[18] The Three Ecologies is a human-centered call to arms for the salvation of society and the natural environment.

He problematises the environmental crisis by identifying that it is connected to a breakdown of social and cultural relationships and of “human modes of life, both individual and collective.”[19] Societies are rapidly homogenising, and subjectivities are desingularising,[20] under the yoke of the IWC’s most powerful subjugating tool, mass media.[21]

Refusal to face up to the erosion in these three areas, as the media would have us do, verges on a strategic infantilization of opinion and a destructive neutralization of democracy. We need to ‘kick the habit’ of sedative discourse, particularly the fix of television, in order to apprehend the world through the interchangeable lenses or points of view of the three ecologies.[22]

The three ecologies, environmental, social, and mental, are separate but inseparable – interchangeable inside the “ethico-aesthetic aegis” that frames his discourse.[23] Bennett compares his method with that of Catholic doctrine that expresses “the mysterious unity of the three persons of God… There are three ecologies, says Guattari, or, as the Baltimore Catechism says, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three persons ‘really distinct from one another,’”[24] but interconnected and effected by their woven and disparate connections. With this in mind “nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think transversally.”[25]

He asks us to question what it is that we value, or should value. A complex situation requires a complex reconfiguration, response, contemplation, and input, across the spectrum of societies’ subjectivities and recognising differences and values beyond the values of market interests. “What condemns the capitalist value system is that it is characterized by general equivalence, which flattens out all other forms of value, alienating them in its hegemony.”[26]

For Guattari, environmental destruction cannot be addressed by “political groupings and executive authorities [that] appear to be totally incapable of understanding the full implications of these issues.”[27] We find ourselves caught in a “nagging paradox” where technological and scientific responses to the ecology, which will probably be needed to help repair the problem, are not engaged by bringing “social forces” into action.[28] Progress is advanced through an acknowledgement of the complexity of the scenario. Rather than focus on single-issue fixes, such as “industrial pollution,” a shift in “the reconstruction of social and individual practices,” is required.”[29] The notion that it is no longer enough to save the whale/river/forest/ozone layer, was a turn away from an environmentalism that he saw as increasingly fractious and ineffective. “Ecology must stop being associated with the image of a small nature-loving minority or with qualified specialists.”[30] As Morton later observed, “Particularism can muster a lot of passion, but it can become shortsighted.”[31]

Central to Guattari’s argument is a call to contest the effects of capitalism, not via a consolidated consenting mass but rather by “scouting out the potential vectors of subjectification and singularization at each partial, existential locus.”[32] The IWC seeks to control, define, and commodify (through hegemonic means) singular and existential reference points such as “childhood, love, art, as well as everything associated with anxiety, madness, pain, death, or a feeling of being lost in the Cosmos.”[33] Hope is found by not succumbing to the hegemony of the IWC, but by transitioning from this “mass-media era to a post-media age, in which the media will be reappropriated by a multitude of subject-groups capable of directing its resingularization.”[34] This is his transversal lens of interchangeable, divergent and convergent subjectivities, as an altered state of engagement. Bennett summarises it as “ways we might develop this newish self.”[35]

The Three Ecologies was written by Guattari at a time when he found himself “disconcerted [and] disgusted by traditional politics.” France’s Greens were ensconced in “party fractionalism” that eventually saw a splinter party, Génération Ecologie, break off from Les Verts, in the early 1990s.[36] He maintained membership in both parties moving “transversally between [the] two” groups.[37] Gary Genosko notes that “Guattari’s vision [at this time] recaptures the sense of the ecology ‘movement’ in general which would, if applied to party politics, allow its recomposition in a way that respected pluralism and diversity.” [38] The Three Ecologies emerged out of this context. It is refreshingly acynical, but also has the rose tint of a utopian dream that sometimes glosses over paradoxical cracks in his discourse. He critiques the self-interested elements of environmentalism that have simultaneously been appropriated and subjugated by the IWC, and how “capitalistic subjectivity seeks to gain power by controlling and neutralizing the maximum number of existential refrains. It is intoxicated with and anaesthetized by a collective feeling of pseudoeternity.”[39] He underestimates, perhaps hopefully, the tenacity, agility and adaptability of the neoliberal agenda, Jeremy Gilbert suggests that: “…if any function defines the machinic specificity of neoliberalism, it is the tendency to potentiate individuals qua individuals while simultaneously inhibiting the emergence of all forms of potent collectivity.”[40] Flexible labour and deregulation have not backfired as part of their “promoted themes” as Guattari suggested they might. [41] Rather the IWC co-opts sustainable practices, social design, crediting carbon, and producing green commerce, as a few examples, and essentially seeks monetisable problems to respond to as normal progressions and diversions in the market economy. As Morton reflects: “The capitalist language of deregulation, flow, and circulation masks the static, repetitive, “molar” quality of capitalist forms.”[42] At the same time these conditions have directed Green politics into economic policy decisions that often run counterpoint to their base social, ethical, and environmental positions, in order they are not rendered invisible and obsolete in the current political culture. For example the Australian Greens Economic Policy Statement deploys the terminology of, and is clearly framed within, a capitalist economic discourse. However, the Party maintains, as one of it core principles, that “measures of national progress should include indicators of ecological sustainability and social wellbeing.”[43] It is a perplexing and paradoxical position to be in and one can argue that they need to take the necessary exegencies in order to even remain in the conversation. This can be observed in the tools they propose for change, which are framed within the language of the Market Economy, as is demonstrated in principle seven:

Governments have an essential role in regulating markets and ensuring that any externalities are reflected in market prices of goods and services. In a mixed economy, markets that function well and are fair, efficient and competitive, have an important role in the allocation of resources.[44]

Ingolfur Blühdorn notes that the German Greens were also forced to make a policy turn, during their 2009 campaign in order they continue to have a constituency. Their “economic policy positions which appear diametrically opposed to their original [‘post-materialist’, ‘economic anti-politics’] stance,”[45] have been redrafted to acknowledge the current conditions. When the German Greens started, the landscape was totally different and neo-liberalism was in a youthful stage of its grip on world economies.[46]

Consideration of these current political and social conditions hones into the opening salvo of Guattari’s argument. Otherness [alterité] is smoothed off, drawn closer to the centre, and normalized.[47] In a later text, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, he concedes, “the neo-liberal myth of the world market has acquired incredible powers of suggestion over the last few years. According to this myth, no sooner does an economic ensemble submit to its law than its problems dissolve as if by magic.”[48]

The Three Ecologies is of its time, yet it still has an evocative weight to it, and more than a few Cassandra moments that cause pause. Genosko argues that “[Guattari’s] most original contribution to the theorization of ecology [is his] concern with the quality of subjectivity… [It] is what holds together art and ecology.”[49] The theses his text proposes ripple out across art and theoretical practices that are situated in latter post-environmental and post-nature discourses that make up the next section of this chapter. The Three Ecologies, and his later writing in Chaosmosis, have incited approaches that seek alternate perceptions on the ecological subject, through the potential of cinematic affect. Also compelling to the ethos of this project is Guattari’s stance that “…artists have got nothing to teach anyone,” artworks are not pedagogy, rather, they are “toolkits composed of concepts, percepts and affects, which diverse publics will use at their convenience.”[50]

Guattari is a companion of the artist. He values aesthetic provocations as much if not more than that of quantitative or qualitative approaches.[51] In The Three Ecologies he articulates that ecological praxes “seek something that runs counter to the ‘normal’ order of things…”[52] Inside this statement is an agitation that is also a refrain throughout this research. It is not the intent of this project to merely show what is there, or present a logical argument or narrative. There is low-to-no stickiness in that approach, no contemplative silence to regroup and consider the strangeness of the present.

Being carried beyond familiar territories into alterities of all sorts permits the emergence of new valorizations, new social practices, new subjectivities. Artists can provide the means for these creative forward flights, these breakaways.[53]

To attain that breakaway moment, from a normal present of disengaged existence, demands, from the position of this research, a disrupting recalibration of the senses. “The work of art, for those who use it, is an activity of unframing, of rupturing sense, of baroque proliferation or extreme impoverishment, which leads to a recreation and a reinvention of the subject itself…”[54] As an alternate method of engagement with the world, the texts surveyed throughout this chapter, and in the exegesis as a whole, return repeatedly to the theme of disruption of the normal encounter or experience of the world.

Evocative Things or Vital Materialisms:

A contrail is the ice that forms from the water condensation that is left over from the expulsion of a jet engine – a trace in the sky of a plane passing by. It is an everyday modern thing, not human, nor animal, just a temporary fleeting object in a cool blue sky. Yet there is something affective, contemplative and evocative in that thing for me.

To draw back in the human encounter is to imagine, within these lines in the sky, the narrative arcs of tightly packed distant passengers ten kilometres above enclosed in metal capsules. They are vacationers; business people; émigrés; those fleeing the past; those returning to the ones they love. To see the contrail itself is another encounter that catches you out of your normal traverses through the world. You are doing something, drinking coffee, talking to a friend, or taking a walk, and then out of the corner of your eye you see a line that ruptures the immediate, time, place, and action. You look up and think something else. A contrail is never encountered by itself. They are always accompanied by another thought or memory.

Fig. 3. Andrew Denton. [Film Still: Flight] Contrail #1, California, U.S.A. (2014).

It is my experience that objects or things can have the quality to bring about a pause in the everyday. This position supported an early decision to deprioritise the human in the images produced during this research. Morton may be lingering in the background of these thoughts of the affective, uncanny, quality of the non-human, with his reframing of the uncanny around the notion of the “strange stranger.” [55] Nicholas Royle describes “the uncanny is a crisis of the proper: it entails a critical disturbance of what is proper…”[56] Morton takes Freud’s lead in theorizing his own notions of the uncanny, as “…that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar.”[57] Freud builds his thesis, which by his own acknowledgement is an aesthetic one, through his psychoanalytical lens.^[58]

In Morton’s ‘Ecology without Nature’ discourse, while “the strange stranger is us,”[59] it is more not us. Royle extrapolates that the uncanny is “a crisis of the natural, touching upon everything that one might have thought was ‘part of nature’: one’s own nature, human nature, the nature of reality and the world.”[60] Morton makes a similar historical link between nature and the uncanny, referring to Freud’s description of being lost in a high altitude forest.[61] “Forests are iterations of trees, and hence highly uncanny. Freud’s exemplary image of the uncanny is of being lost in one…”[62] Then, what does the uncanny look, or more accurately, feel like without its historical companion – Nature? What we are left with “is a vastly more complex situation that is uncanny and intimate at the same time.”[63] It is in this realization that the uncanny sensation of living without the mythology of Nature presents itself.

“Our encounter with other beings becomes profound. They are strange, even intrinsically strange. Getting to know them makes them stranger. When we talk about life forms, we’re talking about strange strangers.”[64] These thoughts reformed and regrouped during the production of the film project Aspects of Trees. As I recorded images, alone in the forest, thinking and feeling these non-human, living and dying things, the hair on my arms rose and tingled. Later this feeling returned as I filmed the tanker trucks leaving Fort MacMurray, with their loads of oil tar, heading south to the refineries in Edmonton. Things and non-human beings are capable of producing sensations, percepts of fragments, transformed into affects, of what Morton categorises as hyperobjects. He stresses: “The intensity of the hyperobject’s aesthetic trace seems unreal in its very luminosity.”[65] It is the non-human traces that have dominated camera frame during the collection of the recorded images, while the human form has lingered in the periphery.[66]

Jane Bennett’s vital materialist project has allegiances with Morton’s notion of the ‘strange stranger.’ She is concerned with the power of things, “thing-power,” that can evoke an affective response in the beholder, “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle,”[67] and what that means to how we perceive and operate in the world. Her work has been a re-occuring intercessor in this project’s focus, which has concentrated on the things humans make, or with which we interface, and discard, in relation to post-industrial societal reliance on fossil fuel consumption. This dependence has an alienating force on social and ecological relationships with things human and non-human alike. Sensations of strangeness weave through Bennett’s discourse as she problematizes subjective encounters with things (those that have the baggage of cultural and historical weight), with that of the vitality of matter itself. In Vibrant Matter Bennett turns “the figures of ‘life’ and ‘matter’ around and around, worrying them until they start to seem strange, in something like the way a common word when repeated can become a foreign, nonsense sound. In the space created by this estrangement, a vital materiality can start to take shape.”[68] “Thing-power” has its lineage, for Bennett, in Spinoza’s conatus,[69] Theroux’s “the Wild or that uncanny presence that met him in the Conchord woods,”[70] and is also aligned with “what Hent de Vries, in the context of political theology, called ‘the absolute’ or that ‘intangible and imponderable’ recalcitrance.”[71]

Bennett’s affective experience of encountering discarded objects, on a grate over a storm drain, struck a chord with my own experiences of the objects and landscapes I film. Her discourse is a useful instrument to contemplate the affective quality of things. The narrative of her encounter with debris, which included a plastic glove, dead rat, pollen, a stick of wood, and a plastic bottle cap, provoked perplexing affects in her. She “was repelled by the dead (or was it merely sleeping?) rat and dismayed by the litter, but [she] also felt something else: a nameless awareness of the impossible singularity of that rat, that configuration of pollen, that otherwise utterly banal, mass-produced plastic water-bottle cap.”[72] In the initial encounter, as with my example of the contrail, she wraps a human narrative around the objects as they transfer between debris and things. Thoughts of the success of the rat poisoner (“human activity”) coexist alongside her repulsion of that dead rodent.[73] But Bennett feels something beyond that rat and the other things in its milieu. There is the interconnection between the materiality of the things and their surrounds: their “contingent tableau,” (including the weather, the street, and her) that ” shimmer and spark.”[74] Together, as an assemblage, she caught a “glimpse of [their] energetic vitality,” as such they infer new meaning and new possible readings as things, “objects appeared as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics.”[75] The scales fall from her eyes, she is able to see the world anew, and to perceive the “items on the ground that day [as] vibratory – at one moment disclosing themselves as dead stuff and at the next as live presence: junk, then claimant; inert matter, then live wire.”[76] Bennett’s concerns go beyond the acknowledgement of the vibrancy of matter, helpful though this is to shift perception on the world. It is the interface between “human beings and thinghood” and “the extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other” that she finds a mode to reconsider the world and its threatened environment.[77] She reminds us that humans are also non-human and that things have their own agency, when we take this into account, “impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us, will generate a more subtle awareness of the complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies, and will enable wiser interventions into that ecology.” [78]

What is compelling about this provocation — to consider the interconnected vitality of us and things, and us as things interfacing with other things — is that it requires a re-thinking around human and non-human agency and how that can shift perception in regards to the ecological crisis. “In a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself. Such an enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans.”[79]

Subjectivity is difficult to cast aside. Bennett has Thoreau, Plumwood, Guattari, Rancière, and a host of other intercessors zig-zagging through her thoughts, as well as the historical and cultural frameworks that have constructed her world-view. She also has the experience of being where she is when she is sleepy or alert, irritated or peaceful, and all the other feelings and filters that make up a person, and shift and change sensations and experiences.

This impulse toward cultural, linguistic, or historical constructivism, which interprets any expression of thing-power as an effect of culture and the play of human powers, politicizes moralistic and oppressive appeals to ‘nature.’ And that is a good thing. But the constructivist response to the world also tends to obscure from view whatever thing-power there may be.[80]

It is quite a trick then to be able to consider the world outside of human agency and ultimately it isn’t exactly what Bennett is asking for when she proposes moments of “methodological naiveté, [and] for the postponement of a genealogical critique of objects.”[81] It is about acknowledging and repositioning non-human agency, with the understanding that humans are also non-humans, and “a lot happens to the concept of agency once nonhuman things are figured less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans themselves are assessed not as autonoms but as vital materialities.” It is not matter of either/or or us and them but a meshing of the human with the non-human for mutual benefit and understanding.^[82]

This project lays no claim to upholding a vital materialist position but there are aspects in Bennett’s project that ally with the thoughts that inform the practice. Looking at things in the world differently – and not prioritizing the human subject – opens up new possibilities for understanding, and provides other tools for reading the networks of things that make up, influence and disrupt human and non-human milieus.

The Strange and the Perplexing Feelings of Living in a Time of Ecological Emergency:

To have ecology, we must give up Nature. But since we have been addicted to Nature for so long, giving up will be painful. Giving up a fantasy is harder than giving up a reality.[83]

Timothy Morton’s project on the ‘Ecological Thought’ has intersected with the spectrum of concerns that have stimulated the thinking and making of the project outlined in this exegesis. At the core of his position is a rejection of the “mythology” of “Nature,” as a capitalist, romantic, and ecocritical construction that subverts and blocks meaningful engagement with the ecological problem. Morton’s assertions that “our continued survival, and therefore the survival of the planet we’re now dominating beyond all doubt, depends on our thinking past Nature,” opened an alternate pathway to consider the ecological crisis subject through the practice.[84] This adjustment in thinking, along with Rancière’s politics of aesthetics and Judith Butler’s writing on grief in Precarious Life, which I cover in Chapter Two, activated a shift from incapacitated melancholy to confronting through making, and a recalibration of eyes, and ears, to the strangeness of living in a time of ecological emergency. Morton’s ‘strange,’ and ‘uncanny’ view of the current and future conditions profoundly intersected the project, while at the same time clicked into focus approaches for contemplating the ecological subject, visually and aurally, with an aim to harnessing these disorientating sensations as allies to the process of experiencing the world anew. In this section I identify and discuss significant strands, framed in Morton’s ‘Ecological Thought’ that have woven their way through this project, as antagonisms to push up against, or considerations that have caused pause and led to experimentation.

The key elements of concern are his notions of the ‘mesh’ and the ‘strange stranger’, and as previously mentioned, contemplation, melancholy, and the ‘uncanny’ experience living in and owning up to the ecological emergency. Other asides and thoughts are enlisted, and referred to as needed, throughout this chapter and the exegesis whole. Particularly evocative are his visually acute reflections on global warming and fossil fuel consumption.

In Ecology without Nature, Morton hones his argument for discarding the idea of “Nature,” as a necessary step in forming a new method of ecological and aesthetic thinking that realigns how humans perceive and “experience their place in the world.”[85] He builds the foundation for his argument via a critique of art and literature that is rooted in Romantic traditions of “nature writing,” texts he refers to as “ecomimesis.” “Ecomimesis is a pressure point, crystallizing a vast and complex ideological network of beliefs, practices, and processes in and around the idea of the natural world. It is extraordinarily common, both in nature writing and in ecological criticism.”[86] This reflective approach, “accounts for the phenomenon of environmentalism in culture [by] delving into the details of poetry and prose, and stepping back to see the big picture, while offering a critique of the workings of ‘Nature’ at different levels.”[87] The Ecological Thought calls out nature as a ‘fantasy’ construction of ecomimetic art, ecocriticism, and post-industrial capitalism. To fantasise nature is to reify it, to make it an “object ‘over there,’” in the distance.[88]

Morton refers to his methods as ecocritique…

…a twofold process, consisting both in exuberant friendliness and disarming skepticism. The approach is not to be confused with nihilism. We are treading a path between saying that something called nature exists, and saying that nothing exists at all.[89]

His project is compelling as he not only interrogates the causes of the ecological emergency (capitalism), but also the representations (in art and literature), and responses (through ecocriticism and environmental activism), which have led to ineffective action. It is his proposal that the reification of nature in each of these contexts has exacerbated human impact on the natural environment.

The idea of nature is all too real, and it has an all too real effect upon all too real beliefs, practices, and decisions in the all too real world. True, I claim that there is no such ‘thing’ as nature, if by nature we mean some thing that is single, independent, and lasting. But deluded ideas and ideological fixations do exist. ‘Nature’ is a focal point that compels us to assume certain attitudes. Ideology resides in the attitude we assume toward this fascinating object. By dissolving the object, we render the ideological fixation inoperative.[90]

The initial encounter with Morton’s work intersected with the production of the film, Aspects of Trees (2015).[91] The film is an early test project that emerged out of my personal experiences as a tree planter and reforestation manager, in Canada, from 1992 to 2003. The subject of the work is the Mountain Pine Beetle Epidemic in North America. Around the year 2000 the pine beetle returned to the US and Canada for its natural cycle of culling elder stands of trees. However, decades of warming winter climates, and forest industry practices that prioritise mono-species planting, means that the beetle has no adversaries and a surplus of food. The ecological disaster is a reminder of the complexity and fragility of our ecology under stress.[92] The film is an nascent attempt, in the research, to accentuate the tension between a realist representation of pine beetle infected dying forests of North America, against what is not seen and heard in a neurotypical experience of standing amongst the slowly rotting trees and on distant clear-cuts. The work experiments with cinematic affect to eschew factual or realistic modes of representation in favour of expressive contemplations, seeking to evoke an experience of being in an entropic forest. The structure of the film sets up a space of attenuated tranquility, then systematically dismantles this perception, and draws on the uncanny sensations of a loss of something not quite remembered, while at the same time seeking out sounds and images, through technology, that are usually invisible and unhearable, to seek ways to make them seen and heard as part of the overall accentuation of the subject. I discuss the production of Aspects of Trees in detail in Chapter Four. I introduce it here as an important point of convergence between the developing practical and theoretical frameworks.

The pine beetle crisis is devastating on any level – micro or macro. The scale is unthinkable; Morton might conclude it “a hyperobject.” As I write this chapter, under the fluorescent lights of Strathcona County Library in Alberta, Canada, in August 2015, hundreds of pine beetle infected, and drought ridden, forests burn across the West Coast of North America. I know this because I keep getting push notices from CNN and NPR to view clips of water bombers futilely attacking the flames. Also – when I walk outside for fresh air I can’t see across the street for all the smoke.

Fig. 4. Andrew Denton. [Photograph] Strathcona County and Forest Fire Smoke, Alberta,
Canada (2015).

Fighting the fires is a twofold folly of saving mono-species plantation forests, and houses built on the tinderbox hillsides of a century of misguided resource management. The event articulately highlights the question that Morton raises around the capitalist fantasy of mythological nature.[93] The plantation forests and the beetle epidemic, like the National Park, are the coalescence of Morton’s nightmares: “Wilderness areas are giant, abstract versions of the products hanging in mall windows. Even when we’ve tried to preserve an enclave of safety from the ravages of the modern age, we’ve been getting it all wrong.”[94]

During this project there have been milestones where the contextual review of knowledge and practice, and the making of the work, have had activating moments of connection. These are the exegetic pathways traversed in this document. The research discussed here emerged out of a hunch that the ecological subject is cast under a spell of multiple layers of invisibility that pushes it outside peripheral collective consciousness, a type of shared cognitive dissonance, perhaps invoked by overwhelming media coverage, subjectivities, and complexities of the subject, and/or by the social frameworks and consequences of late capitalism. “The logic of capital has made sure that the environment certainly isn’t what we have been calling Nature any more.”[95] This, hunch, as I discuss later in the next chapter, directed the critical inquiry towards Rancière’s project on the politics of aesthetics, with particular attention to his description of the distribution of the sensible: that which is “capable of being apprehended by the senses.”[96] To that end Aspects of Trees was made under the simple emergent aegis of attempting to make the invisible visible and the unhearable hearable.

While filming pickups for Aspects of Trees, in Canada, these attempts crossed paths with critical engagements with Morton’s The Ecological Thought and his subsequent work Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. The text highlighted some unintentional paradoxes between the intent of the work and the film in progress. Early edits overworked the visual and aural material to meaningless abstractions. His discussion on ‘ambient poetics’ activated new experimentations with the visual and sound elements, and crucially led to a reshoot, and subsequent re-edit, of key elements in the work, as well as a significant rethink through the next direction of the research. Morton’sreflections on art, contemplation, melancholy, intimacy, the uncanny and his account of the ‘mesh’ and the ‘strange stranger’, have considerations, ethics, and politics that have alignments with the positions framed in this project. Morton reflects: “Nature as such appears when we lose it, and it’s known as loss. Along with the disorientation of the modern world goes an ineffable sadness.”[97] I now refer to Aspects of Trees as a eulogy for the lost forests, but making the film also operated as personal loss of innocence that invoked a moment of clarity, and a potential way forward.

“Modernity,” says Morton, “is the story of how oil got into everything.”[98] Look hard at that statement and it is difficult to refute. Complexity, interconnectedness, and interdependence are discursive elements of his ‘Ecological Thought.’ Oil and the infrastructures and social structures of fossil fuel-based capitalism are the focus of the creative outcomes exhibited for the purpose of this research project. Sometimes the references are direct, and sometimes they are tenuous, but look at any of the images or listen to any of the audio in the works and the links will fall into focus. The contextual, critical and theoretical positions reviewed in this exegesis cannot be compartmentalized as trigger mechanisms that incite the practice. They have operated together at most times, though harmonizing at different volumes, and punctuating different points or directions, and sometimes turning up long after the practice has started to experiment with the subject. Sometimes like couch-surfing friends they just turn up out of nowhere. The way Morton’s lens operates as an incitement to slow down, and contemplate a worldview that is interconnected, interdependent and complex, is a mediating influence on the methods of practice: “Aristotle asserted that the highest form of praxis was contemplation. We shouldn’t be afraid to withdraw and reflect.”[99] The causes of the ecological emergency can get in the way of what we think we want, be tedious, obscure, and repetitive, and hence difficult to see. If Rancière helps thinking about the politics of aesthetics, and Deleuze offers tactics into expressive, sensational, and affective registers, Morton agitates what to look at and how to look at it strangely. Ecology without nature… what does this look like?[100]

A Turn in the Practice:

The new direction of the project commenced within a few weeks of camera testing and reviewing the footage filmed around the Sherwood Park/Edmonton oil refineries, in Alberta, Canada. As the focus of the project moved towards objects, things, and landscapes that are interlaced with the structures and infrastructures of fossil fuels, the field excursion methods shifted to spending hours, sometimes days, in the same locale and often in the same camera position. Repetition of image and subject became one of the site techniques. Because of the nature of the subject, I was regularly confronted by security services and had to adopt a range of methods to deflect their interest, from low key distant camera positions to the subject, filming from a vehicle, use of telephoto lenses, to adopting the fashion of the territory and donning a high visibility vest, work boots, and a hard hat – the latter is by far the most effective. The field excursions drew out several realisations and decisions that I will go into in depth in Chapter Four. However, it is helpful to briefly outline the context of the choices made in the practice as a sounding board for reflection on the themes and critical discourses that make up the rest of this chapter and segue through the exegesis. Rather than make blunt linkages between the theory and the practice, I prefer to present a nutshell of the production methods as a key to refer to, while I discuss the critical frameworks that have mediated those processes.

During the collection of the recorded materials the human form is deprioritised, moved to the side of or removed from the frame entirely, in favour of the non-human. The footage is filmed at very high speeds (slow motion) with very little camera movement from fixed positions or linear (tracking) movements, formal, very slow, moving compositions that unfold on the subject. Use of either extreme wide (12-16mm), or super telephoto (400-800mm) lenses, rather than lenses that replicate human perspective (35-55mm), is used to disrupt perspective. “Appreciating strangeness is seeing the very strangeness of similarity and familiarity. To reintroduce the uncanny into the poetics of the home (oikos, ecology, ecomimesis) is a political act.”[101] While there are images of the refineries in the film, as well as oil pipelines, highways and trucks, these are placed alongside ancillary connections to the subject, which range from shopping malls, golf courses in the desert, tourism, surfers, housing developments, LAX, Hollywood, Santa Monica, bird colonies, contrails, the homeless, the Salton Sea, garbage dumps, recycling centres, and the wind farms that punctuate the skylines of California.

Fig. 5. Andrew Denton. [Film Still: Crude] Palm Springs Airport and Wind Farms, California,
U.S.A. (2013).

It was imagined at the time of production that shots would last for at least one minute and that the final works would be made up of a collection of long and extremely long takes of single but connected subjects – not montaged scenes – but fragments of the subjects to spend time with. Unlike a constructed scene that has multiple options for escape via cutaways, the shot has to work on its own terms before it releases into the next one. Sound was recorded using contact mics and a specially designed microphone set-up that captured a wide range of spectral sound. Specific sound elements were also collected to layer and construct depth and focus where needed. In addition a range of audio recordings were mined from the radio, television and the Internet as another core sample into the temporal space of the subject. From a subjective point of view (as the camera operator), I tried to assume a contemplative, languid, open and patient demeanor, however, I was also tired, depressed, too cold and too hot. The many months of shooting this subject took a toll on my mental health. Long stints of solo fieldwork are physically arduous, mentally stressful, and can be excruciatingly boring. But intense focus and concentration, when it appears that nothing is happening, can draw out and agitate the subject into the camera lens in a different way, sharpening an altered state of acuity. Things are transformed and new connections are made: “reframing our world, our problems, and ourselves is part of the ecological project. This is what praxis means – action that is thoughtful and thought that is active.”[102]

Morton’s project is contemplative; it wants to take time to regroup, reflect and adjust perspective on the ecological subject. His position “takes seriously the idea that truly theoretical reflection is possible only if thinking decelerates. This is not the same thing as becoming numb or stupid. It is finding anomalies, paradoxes, and conundrums in an otherwise smooth-looking stream of ideas.” This can be read as a call to a certain kind of theoretical meditative state or receptive demeanour, one that is open to “thinking big” rather than “small is beautiful.”[103] This is his ‘Ecological Thought.’ It is vast in scope, brooding, drenched in melancholy and uncanny encounters. But it is also suffused with compassion, empathy, and affect. Situated inside these perplexing contemplations are his notions of the “mesh” and the “strange stranger.”

For Morton: “Life forms constitute a mesh that is infinite and beyond concept – unthinkable as such.”[104] The mesh is made up of entities that are simultaneously too little (like DNA), and too big (the Universe), to comprehend.[105] It is the interconnection of living beings, “strange strangers,” but this interconnection also “implies separateness and difference. There would be no mesh if there were no strange strangers. The mesh isn’t a background against which the strange stranger appears. It is the entanglement of all strangers.”[106] It is not a holistic interconnectivity like that of a community; rather Morton prefers the analogy of a collectivity: “collectivity signifies the conscious choosing of a coexistence that already exists whether we think it or not.”[107] The mesh appears solid, but it is not. It is filled with holes and gaps and the “threading between them”[108] is what gives it purchase: “the interconnectedness of everything is a finely woven tissue that floats in front of what elsewhere I have called strange strangers: all entities, from Styrofoam and radio waves to peanuts, snakes and asteroids, are irreducibly uncanny.”[109]

Jane Bennett and Timothy Morton overlap in some of their thinking. They both speak of the ‘enmeshed’ and the ‘collective’, and both ask us to think outside of an anthropocentric subjectivity in their arguments. For Bennett, “humanity and nonhumanity have always performed an intricate dance with each other. There was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity; today this mingling has become harder to ignore.”[110] Morton would unlikely dispute this, however where Bennett is invested in a “distributed agency” across the human and the non-human, Morton is drawn more towards an acknowledgement, embracing, and confronting of the differences across the spectrum of human and non-human beings. For him, there is much to be gained from the strange feelings that these encounters can evoke when we face up to their differences. These encounters have notes of disconcerting complexity. The assertion that “the strange stranger is not only strange, but strangely so. They could be us. They are us,”[111] has similar implications to Bennett’s call to “give up the futile attempt to disentangle the human from the nonhuman.”[112] However both encounter their non-human beings from different nuanced interactions. For Bennett the non-human potential starts with an affective encounter. So too with Morton, however, her path diverges towards collaboration. She suggests that through these encounters we…

…devise new procedures, technologies, and regimes of perception that enable us to consult nonhumans more closely, or to listen and respond more carefully to their outbreaks, objections, testimonies, and propositions. For these offerings are profoundly important to the health of the political ecologies to which we belong.[113]

Askew to this, Morton rather wants to be ‘enchanted’ and ‘intimate’ with the ‘strange stranger’ than to team up and work things out. Indeed the “more we know about strange strangers, the more we sense the void…[and] the inbuilt uncanniness of strange strangers is part of how we can be intimate with them.”[114] He says: “we simply can’t unthink modernity. If there is any enchantment, it lies in the future. The ecological ‘enchants the world,’ if enchantment means exploring the profound and wonderful openness and intimacy of the mesh.”[115] The aims of the practice, not to teach, tell, or, conclude, but to sense, feel, and fall under the spell of the subject, as a method of reconnection and recalibration of world-view, makes Morton’s position evocative. “We need to get out of the persuasion business and start getting into the magic business.”[116] With this in mind, ecological art practices, from his position, might have to drop “happy-happy-joy-joy eco-sincerity,”[117] and move towards the dark, ironic, and uncanny register of the ecological thought.[118]

Morton invokes notions of the ‘uncanny’ throughout his ‘Ecological Thought.’ Melancholy and fear can be resulting emotions that rise from the uncanny. It is this acknowledgement of the strange feeling of living now that has coursed its way through the creative outcomes discussed in this exegesis.[119] There are layers to the experience of the uncanny that Morton harnesses to argue his position. In his critique of ecomimetic texts he reveals the uncanny as an elemental aspect of those writers’ and artists’ experience of Nature. Thoreau’s Walden Pond and Coleridge’s poetry are examples of how the uncanny is acknowledged, even reified, across this type of environmental rhetoric. Morton points out that it is not only in the strange encounters with Nature, which these works describe, but also through Romantic poetic techniques that employ familiar language and repetition, introducing “a very strong rhythm of the uncanny.”[120] He says: “Strangeness is associated with rhythm because repetition evokes strangeness. Familiarity in poetics is repetition, rhythm; even imagery can have rhythm.”[121]

In the Romantic representational context, experiencing Nature is uncanny. After the departure of a mythological Nature, in the late industrial context, another type of uncanny emerges from our sensate experience of what Morton calls hyperobjects. Hyperobjects are “things that are massively distributed over time and space relative to humans.” [122] They are inconceivable in their entirety, rendered unimaginable by their vast finitudes that measure in hundreds of thousands of years or more. [123]

Global warming is a hyperobject. It is part of the struggle of the practice to encounter and think about the global warming hyperobject – it is extremely slippery and cannot be captured as a whole.[124] And there are hyperobjects inside and around other hyperobjects. Tar sands, highway systems, radio, the Internet, and the sensations they evoke when experiencing or encountering glimpses of them, have translated into strange ways of seeing collections of fragments, and thinking about them. “We can only see pieces of hyperobjects at a time. The reason why they appear nonlocal and temporally foreshortened is precisely because of this transdimensional quality. We only see pieces of them at once, like a tsunami or a case of radiation sickness.”[125] Morton’s project has intercessed the practice nonlinearly. I film a heat shimmer on a road, maybe because I read Morton, maybe I read Morton because I filmed a shimmer, or maybe having filmed and read, the shimmer becomes evident to me as uncanny, as revealing the hyperobject. Making creative works up against the ecological emergency, in the new epoch of the Anthopocene, requires alternate methods of contemplation, methods that acknowledge that there is no going back to an environmentalism of saving a planet that can be thought without the notion of Nature. The point Morton is making through his non-anthropocentric (OOO) approach[126] suggests that thinking about the hyperobject means that ‘we’ are past thinking the “end of the world” as a concept. It is not helpful for the environmental discourse to situate around “the strongly held belief that the world is about to end ‘unless we act now,’ [and that this] is paradoxically one of the most powerful factors that inhibit a full engagement with our ecological coexistence here on Earth.”[127]

Like science fictions, “hyperobjects are messages in bottles from the future: they do not quite exist in a present, since they scoop the standard reference points from the idea of present time.”[128] These messages from the future make us feel something. The feelings they evoke are as unsettling as the experience of living in the time of the hyperobject he describes: familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Because hyperobjects are all around us and in everything they are sticky and hard to grasp at the same time.[129] By thinking about global warming in this way it releases the practice from a need to unpack the subject with honed narratives or polemic discourses, rather that there is a vein of political potential, for an art practice, not so much in reasoned argument, but in the affects of encountering the strangely familiar slivers of the ecological subject.

Reasoning on and on is a symptom of how people are still not ready to go through an affective experience that would existentially and politically bind them to hyperobjects, to care for them. We need art that does not make people think (we have quite enough environmental art that does that), but rather that walks them through an inner space that is hard to traverse.[130]

And it is not that we shouldn’t feel anger and guilt for what we have done to the planet, but rather that there are alternate responses to our predicament that are not as tied to the self, as much as to a collective process of recognition and contemplation that might offer an ethics and praxis forward. Judith Butler, whose writing on grief and affect are discussed in the next chapter, reminds us of this in her essays on 9/11 and the conflicts that ensued from that event: “open grieving is bound up with outrage, and outrage in the face of injustice or indeed of unbearable loss has enormous political potential.”[131]

[1] Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock, 2003 ed., Penguin Classics (New York: Penguin Books, 1919), 144.

[2] Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 125.

[3] “(Often mistranslated into English as ‘mediator’), which Deleuze describes as the conduit for expression.” Erin Manning, Always More Than One : Individuation’s Dance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 231.

[4] Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, 126.

[5] Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (2014), 68.

[6] Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.

[7] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).

[8] Ibid., 65.

[9] Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pinder and Paul Sutton, 2008 ed., Continuum Impacts (London: Continuum, 1989), 45.

[10] Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, viii.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid., vii, 21.

[13] Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, 95.

[14] Morton insists that: “Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ is essential for thinking the ecological thought.” Morton, The Ecological Thought, 52. The strange feeling of the familiar made unfamiliar, especially in regards to Morton’s application of it in his ecological project, is one that is harnessed as a tactic within the practice and is discussed at length later in this chapter.

[15] Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 80.

[16] Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 19.

[17] Post-industrial capitalism, which I prefer to describe as Integrated World Capitalism (IWC), tends increasingly to de-centre its sites of power, moving away from structures producing goods and services towards structures producing signs, syntax and – in particular, through the control which it exercises over the media, advertising, opinion polls, etc. – subjectivity. Ibid., 32.

[18] Ibid., 19.

[19] Ibid.

[20] A singularity is “not an instance or instantiation of anything—it is not particularity or uniqueness. As Deleuze puts it, its individuation is not a specification; and indeed there exist individuations that are quite “impure,” mixing elements from many different species. But this not-fitting-in-a-class, this “indefiniteness” or “vagueness” is not a logical deficiency or incoherence, but, rather, as with what Peirce called “firstness,” it is a kind of power or chance, a “freshness” of what has not yet been made definite by habit or law.” Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, 54-55.

[21] Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 33-34.

[22] Ibid., 28.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 114.

[25] Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 29.

[26] Ibid., 43.

[27] Ibid., 19.

[28] Ibid., 22.

[29] Ibid., 28.

[30] Ibid., 35.

[31] Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, 5-6.

[32] Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 30.

[33] Ibid., 33.

[34] Ibid., 40.

[35] Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 116.

[36] Tensions increased by the early 1990’s as the Green vote found itself split going up against Le Pen’s far right Front National. Gary Genosko, Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (London: Continuum, 2002), 21.

[37] Gary Genosko, “The Life and Work of Félix Guattari: From Transversality to Ecosophy,” in The Three Ecologies (London ; New Brunswick, N.J.: Athlone Press, 2000), 153.

[38] Genosko, Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, 21.

[39] Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 34.

[40] Jeremy Gilbert, “What Kind of Thing Is ‘Neoliberalism’?,” New Formations 80, no. 1 (2013): 21,

[41] Guattari, The Three Ecologies.

[42] Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, 86.

[43] “Economics,” accessed July 25, 2015. http://greens.org.au/policies/economics.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ingolfur Blühdorn, “The German Green Party’s Turn to Economic Policy: A Green New Deal for Sustaining the Unsustainable?” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Toronto, Canada, 2-6 September, 2009), 2.

[46] “[The German Greens] now believe that ecology and economy can be fully compatible, indeed mutually conducive. In a shift that can rightfully be called a paradigm change, ecology has metamorphosed from an obstacle to into a means for further economic development. And the Greens who were once vociferous critics of the capitalist consumer economy are now presenting themselves as the agents of economic recovery and employment growth.” Ibid., 4.

[47] Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 19.

[48] Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 123.

[49] Gary Genosko, “Subjectivity and Art in Guattari’s the Three Ecologies,” in Deleuze/Guattari & Ecology, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Basingstoke England ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 106.

[50] Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, 129.

[51] “Are not the best cartographies of the psyche, or if you like, the best psychoanalyses, those of Goethe, Proust, Artaud and Beckett, rather than Freud, Jung, and Lacan? In fact, it is the literary component in the works of the latter that best survives…”

[52] Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 30.

[53] Genosko, “Subjectivity and Art in Guattari’s the Three Ecologies,” in Deleuze/Guattari & Ecology, 111.

[54] Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, 131.

[55] Morton, The Ecological Thought, 80.

[56] Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 1.

[57] Freud, The Uncanny, 121.

[58] He asserts, “…that every affect arising from an emotional impulse – of whatever kind – is converted into fear by being repressed, it follows that among those things that are felt to be frightening there must be one group in which it can be shown that the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns. This species of the frightening would then constitute the uncanny, and it would be immaterial whether it was itself originally frightening or arose from another affect.” Ibid., 147-48.

[59] Morton, The Ecological Thought, 80.

[60] Royle, The Uncanny, 1.

[61] “One may, for instance, have lost one’s way in the woods, perhaps after being overtaken by fog, and, despite all one’s efforts to find a marked or familiar path, one comes back again and again to the same spot, which one recognizes by a particular physical feature.” Freud, The Uncanny, 144.

[62] Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, 178.

[63] Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, 131.

[64] Morton, The Ecological Thought, 15.

[65] Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, 32.

[66] The audio has a different role I will expand on in detail later in the exegesis.

[67] Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 6.

[68] Ibid., vii.

[69] “Mind and body act in unison and are synchronized by what Spinoza calls conatus, that is to say the desire to become and to increase the intensity of one’s becoming.” Adrian Parr, The Deleuze Dictionary, Rev. ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 212.

[70] “Wildness was a not-quite-human force that addled and altered human and other bodies. It addled an irreducibly strange dimension of matter, an out-side.” Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 2.

[71] Ibid., 3.

[72] Ibid., 4.

[73] Ibid.

[74] Ibid., 5.

[75] Ibid.

[76] Ibid.

[77] Ibid., 4.

[78] Ibid.

[79] Ibid., 13.

[80] Ibid., 17.

[81] Ibid.

[82] “If human culture is inextricably enmeshed with vibrant, nonhuman agencies,and if human intentionality can be agentic only if accompanied by a vast entourage of nonhumans, then it seems that the appropriate unit of analysis for democratic theory is neither the individual human nor an exclusively human collective but the (ontologically heterogeneous) “public” coalescing around a problem.” Ibid., 108.

[83] Morton, The Ecological Thought, 95.

[84] Ibid., 5.

[85] Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, 2.

[86] Ibid., 33.

[87] Ibid., 108.

[88] Ibid., 109.

[89] Ibid., 67-68.

[90] Ibid., 19-20.

[91] Aspects of Trees has been presented to date at The New Zealand Film Festival (2015), and the Jihlava International Documentary Festival (2015).

[92] “Over the past decade climate change has resulted in more area being disturbed by the ravages of insects, fire and disease than in any time since glaciation. In western Canada alone (British Columbia, Alberta and the Yukon) Mountain Pine Beetles have left some 20 million hectares of dead standing forests.” Dirk Brinkman, “Editorial,” Silviculture Magazine Spring 2012 (2012): 6.

[93] “What if capitalism itself relied on fantasies of apocalypse in order to keep reproducing and reinventing itself? What if, finally, Nature as such, the idea of a radical outside to the social system, was a capitalist fantasy, even precisely the capitalist fantasy?” Morton, The Ecological Thought, 125.

[94] Ibid., 7.

[95] Ibid., 102.

[96] Jacques Rancière and Gabriel Rockhill, The Politics of Aesthetics : The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2004), 85.

[97] Morton, The Ecological Thought, 134.

[98] Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, 54.

[99] Morton, The Ecological Thought, 9.

[100] “Ecology talks about areas of life that we find annoying, boring, and embarrassing. Art can help us, because it’s a place in our culture that deals with intensity, shame, abjection, and loss. It also deals with reality and unreality, being and seeming. If ecology is about radical coexistence, then we must challenge our sense of what is real and what is unreal, what counts as existent and what counts as nonexistent. The idea of Nature as a holistic, healthy, real thing avoids this challenge.” Ibid., 10.

[101] Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, 177.

[102] Morton, The Ecological Thought, 9.

[103] Ibid., 37.

[104] Timothy Morton, “Thinking Ecology: The Mesh, the Strange Stranger, and the Beautiful Soul,” Collapse 6 (2010): 268.

[105] “Nothing exists all by itself, and so nothing is fully ‘itself.’ There is curiously ‘less’ of the Universe at the same time, and for the same reasons, as we see ‘more’ of it.” Morton, The Ecological Thought, 15.

[106] Ibid., 44.

[107] Morton, “Thinking Ecology: The Mesh, the Strange Stranger, and the Beautiful Soul,” 278.

[108] Morton, The Ecological Thought, 28.

[109] Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013), 75.

[110] Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 34.

[111] Morton, “Thinking Ecology: The Mesh, the Strange Stranger, and the Beautiful Soul,” 275.

[112] Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 116.

[113] Ibid., 108.

[114] Morton, The Ecological Thought, 80.

[115] Ibid., 104.

[116] Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, 101.

[117] Morton, The Ecological Thought, 104.

[118] “The ecological thought is intrinsically dark, mysterious, and open, like an empty city square at dusk, a half-open door, or an unresolved chord. It is realistic, depressing, intimate, and alive and ironic all at the same time. It is no wonder that the ancients thought that melancholy, their word for depression, was the earth mood. In the language of humour theory, melancholy is black, earthy, and cold.” Ibid., 16.

[119] Morton takes his lead from Freud, who wrote on this affective state through a psychoanalytical lens in his 1919 essay The Uncanny, which he says, “is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed” ‘Unheimlich,’ from the original German, can be translated as unhomely or unfamiliar. Freud, The Uncanny, 148.

[120] Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, 178.

[121] Ibid.

[122] “These gigantic timescales are truly humiliating in the sense that they force us to realize how close to Earth we are. Infinity is far easier to cope with.” Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, 60.

[123] “A hyperobject could be a black hole. A hyperobject could be the Lago Agrio oil field in Ecuador, or the Florida Everglades. A hyperobject could be the biosphere, or the Solar System. A hyperobject could be the sum total of all the nuclear materials on Earth; or just the plutonium, or the uranium. A hyperobject could be the very long-lasting product of direct human manufacture, such as Styrofoam or plastic bags, or the sum of all the whirring machinery of capitalism. Hyperobjects, then, are “hyper” in relation to some other entity, whether they are directly manufactured by humans or not.” Ibid., 1.

[124] Ibid.

[125] Ibid., 70.

[126] “(OOO): object oriented ontology. “an emerging philosophical movement committed to a unique form of realism and non-anthropocentric thinking.” Ibid., 2.

[127] Ibid., 6-7.

[128] Ibid., 138.

[129] Global warming is “viscous. It never stops sticking to you, no matter where you move on Earth. How can we account for this? By arguing that global warming, like all hyperobjects, is nonlocal: it’s massively distributed in time and space.” Ibid., 48.

[130] Ibid., 184.

[131] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London ; New York: Verso, 2004), 39.