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From its very inception, architectural preservation, and the specialist conservation practices that have evolved to support it, have occupied a shifting territory of constant quantification and continually evolving legislation. Architectural designer Cameron Stebbing evokes a menagerie of philosophical ideas used to illustrate and explore the notion that traditional recording techniques ignore hidden and veiled presences within our built environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guest‐Editor Mark Garcia takes us on a spatial journey through some of the notions and precedents of spaceships and spacecraft, their fictive and architectural precursors and current conceptual preoccupations. The contexts these new posthuman architectures and posthumans will have to occupy, endure and travel through are mind‐boggling in their varied complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever more astounding numbers of animals are being farmed for human consumption. Paul Dobraszczyk, a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, argues that humanity does not see or bother to comprehend the cruelty these animals are subjected to within industrialised farming processes and slaughterhouses. This, he says, is a design issue, requiring more effort to be made to give these animals a dignified life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designing architectural interventions for many species that function and are hospitable for a variety of occupants, creating convivial habitats at a range of scales, is a preoccupation of Brooklyn‐based Harrison Atelier. Founder and principal Ariane Lourie Harrison leads us through some of the design collective's award‐ winning projects. As well as encouraging animal inhabitants, the firm's architecture is also smart, observing and recording activity to register data often not previously available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper compares the author’s original proposal called ecorhythmology with contemporary ecophilosophies. After briefly outlining the background and results of more than two decades of research, it examines the seminal theses of Object Oriented Ontology (Graham Harman), Action Network Theory (Bruno Latour) and the concept of being ecological (Timothy Morton) from an ecorhythmological perspective. Taking stock of interesting similarities and correspondences, this analysis also raises new questions, to which the author proposes different solutions. The paper presents two critiques of the reductionism of string theory and compares Harman’s theory of metaphor with the concept of art based on gestural resonance. Further investigations connect Latour’s redistribution of agency to the intersubjective relationship between the human and non-human, and relate hybridity to proximity. In the second part of the paper, Morton’s different temporalities are juxtaposed with rhythmic dimensions, and finally, the article makes a difference between the casual, political and ethical approaches to the phenomenon of tuning. The stakes are always learning and relearning what kind of contact making can lead to greater peace in difficult human – non-human coexistence.

The impact of work intensification on scholarship has emerged as a poignant issue for higher education. The neoliberal university’s obsession with outcomes, efficiency and socio-economic ends produces a culture of haste at odds with the adequate performance of scholarship. This obsession evinces indignation, with calls to restore the centrality and value of slow scholarship as a core feature of higher education. The tension tends to be analysed as a deep dispute between neoliberalism and slow scholarship, each seeking to prevail. This paper presents an alternative way to think of this issue. The discordance between the two can be analysed in terms of Timothy Morton’s ecological view that everything exists within a fluxed state of coexistence. According to this view, everything exists within loop structures in a mesh reality. Within loop structures, everything is constituted by permeable boundaries and is continually in a paradoxical state of being both itself and not itself. Given this, nothing is absolute or fixed. Concepts such as neoliberalism and slow scholarship are themselves interconnected within permeable and paradoxical relations. Dark ecology captures this combination of both connection and difference between all things. One important implication is how ecologically embedded concepts and ideals can challenge traditional ideas about epistemology. This has further implications for our normative thinking about the relationship between slow scholarship and the neoliberal university. An ecological reading of normativity reveals insights from focusing on the inescapable boundedness of slow scholarship in difference relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verstörung—often considered a minor work by Bernhard—is a somewhat overlooked example of ecologically oriented fiction in the German language. In this novel, Bernhard examines the implications of a darkly ecological concept of the environment (as this article characterizes it with reference to Timothy Morton), confronting it with epistemological questions and placing it in the context of psychoanalysis and Schopenhauerian metaphysics. The novel anticipates some important aspects of the Anthropocene thesis in its critique of the nature/culture divide, its widening of the concept of agency, its insistence on viewing individual human history in the context of natural history, its problematization of the natural/synthetic distinction and its consistent utilization of geological imagery. Verstörung is suffused with a remarkable, dark, and twisted proto‐Anthropocene aesthetics. It is a post‐mortem examination of the world after nature, a Gefühls‐ und Gesteinsgeschichte that carries the reader into the dark heart of the Austrian countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Co‐founder of design practice OFICINAA, Silvia Benedito highlights alternative ontologies of 'void' and 'penumbra' – as spaces of expectation and opportunity within which to create areas and objects that exploit these notions in beneficial ways. The ensuing atmospheres cosset natural resource conservation and human delight, related spaces of umbra/penumbra that formed the basis of her studio's Beastie project in New York. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses is the property of Universidad de La Laguna and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An introduction to articles published within the issue is presented, including one which examined the extent to which in-city agriculture could be the answer to increased corporatisation and food insecurity, and another which explored environmental issues by choosing anthropocentric view of settlement in favour of dynamic adaptive coevolution between human development and interacting natural processes.

The concept of nature is under attack from a number of contemporary researchers on ecology. This seems alarming in light of the current struggle to establish the anthropogenic, i.e., non-natural origin of climate change and mass extinction. This paper selects three examples of 'nature denial' by influential writers—Steven Vogel, Timothy Morton, and Bruno Latour—and tries to show that without a concept of nature, their theories are incoherent. Finally, the paper turns to Gernot Böhme for a philosophy of body and nature that can evade the aporias in which the three other writers are entangled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay seeks to trace and investigate ecologically inflected concepts in Jeanette Winterson’s Art & Lies. The general tendency in ecological and ecocritical analyses has long been a selective focus on how nature is represented in literary texts; however, the ecological crisis, globalization, and technological factors that drive environmental degradation are all tethered at the root to preliminary concepts relating to human behaviours, beliefs, values, and expectations. This essay maintains that the diagnoses should begin at the level of culture since it is at that level that ecological problems begin to germinate. Through a discussion that draws on Federico Campagna’s Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality, this essay performs a thematic reading of Art & Lies. Using Campagna’s elucidation of the metaphysical assumptions that inform environmentally destructive practices, it argues that Art & Lies draws attention to these assumptions and identifies in them an obstacle to raising ecological awareness. Additionally, by employing an approach that draws on ecocritical scholarship, this essay discusses how formal and linguistic experimentation in Art & Lies inscribes ecological viewpoints and attempts the mission of redress that could benefit a more ecologically attuned future.

The article presents an analysis of Urd by Ruth Lillegraven and Heime mellom istidene by Guri Sørumgård Botheim. These two works of poetry are studied from an ecocritical perspective primarily inspired by Timothy Morton’s concept of dark ecology and Timothy Clark’s idea of the Anthropocene. The main focus of the analysis is how the poems depict feelings of familiarity between modern humans, their ancestors, and their surroundings. In the discussion, particular attention is paid to the gendered aspects of familial melancholy. In this way, the author seeks to demonstrate how poetic form can contribute to a way of reading in the Anthropocene. Der Artikel analysiert Urd von Ruth Lillegraven und Heime mellom istidene von Guri Sørumgård Botheim. Diese beiden Gedichtsammlungen werden aus einer ökokritischen Perspektive untersucht, die vor allem von Timothy Mortons Konzept der dunklen Ökologie und Timothy Clarks Idee des Anthropozäns inspiriert ist. Im Mittelpunkt der Analyse steht die Frage, wie die Gedichte Gefühle der Vertrautheit zwischen dem modernen Menschen, seinen Vorfahren und seiner Umgebung darstellen. In der Diskussion wird den geschlechtsspezifischen Aspekten der familiären Melancholie besondere Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt. Auf diese Weise versucht der Autor zu zeigen, wie die poetische Form zu einer Lesart im Anthropozän beitragen kann.

This essay considers violence and extinction to articulate the limits of relational, and to a degree also non-relational, flat ontologies. It suggests that relational ontologies cannot register violence because they privilege relations over bodies. Given their contention of ecological progressiveness after nature, this essay focuses on Donna Haraway’s and Rosi Braidotti’s relational posthuman ontologies, while also responding to Timothy Morton’s non-relational, object-oriented ecology. It cautions that rather than being politically progressive—as postnature ecologies claim to be—not respecting boundaries violates bodies. The essay contends that promulgating blurred boundaries as ecological and feminist, as Haraway and Braidotti do, is especially detrimental given the extinction of species and the gender-based disenfranchisement of bodily autonomy. In this PARSE Journal issue on “Violence: Environment”, I argue that if there is only environment, there cannot be any acknowledgement of violence, and that the denial of violence itself constitutes violence. I contend that in flat relational ecologies biodiversity is erased. As Haraway blurs relations and materials between life and art, I contrast her approach to figures and representation with those in contemporaneous writings by Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. I engage with Haraway’s shapeshifting between metaphors and matter from the “Cyborg Manifesto” in postmodernism to some more recent outputs, observing an intentional entanglement in contradictions and an emphasis on construction that is politically problematic as well as anthropocentric. Because Benedict de Spinoza is often embraced by flat relational ontologies for his emphasis on immanence, he is woven in throughout the essay as an interlocutor. His immanence with bodies and affects is contrasted to Braidotti’s monism of immanence without bodies and without affects. I suggest that, counter-intuitively, flat relational ontologies cannot account for affects and affections and observe that Morton’s ecology with objects, too, is without affects. I propose that whereas Spinoza’s ontology of immanence of Nature/God is half flat because it is populated by bodies with natures, Haraway’s ontology is flat and not flat, symmetrical and asymmetrical, in line with her pursuit of contradictions.

Rainer Maria Rilke's significance for a modern eco-poetics has attracted ever-increasing interest over the past two decades, with sophisticated ontological, phenomenological, and even ethological approaches to his animal poems, as well as such late poetic figures as 'das Offene' in Duineser Elegien (1923). However, many of these readings have worked from the persistent premise of a mystical — Romantically inflected or even monistic — conception of nature, grounded in an idealized (re-)union of subject and object and inner and outer spaces. By contrast, this article suggests that we can learn far more from the points of mismatch, irreconcilability, and alienation to be found in the 'thing poetics' of Rilke's so-called 'middle' period (1902–1910). Arguing in dialogue with Timothy Morton's call for a 'dark ecology' and working from Rilke's own theoretical reflections in his Worpswede monograph (1903), I trace out the convoluted entwinements of subject and object, mind and matter, and nature and artifice across both parts of Neue Gedichte (1907 and 1908), and in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). Morton calls for a form of ecological thought that might learn to 'love' the 'non-identical': in other words, properly and truly to recognize the 'irreducible otherness' within our myriad environments. My essay considers what that theoretical love might look like in the poetic practice of one of the great German-language modernists.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article insists that solidarity with nonhumans is not only a fundamental aspect of symbiotic existence, but a key aspect of resistance to global imperialism. Whilst Indigenous communities have long nurtured and maintained a rich symbiosis and solidarity with nonhumans, modern western thought and social theory must seriously expand its collective concepts, if it wants to remain relevant for life in the ruins of pandemics, pollution, and production. Drawing from the work of ecological philosopher Timothy Morton and speculative realisms, this article draws attention to the 'spectral' or inexhaustible quality of things that is often masked by capitalism and anthropocentrism. The trajectory of this article is dependent on the inspiring ontological creativity of Hardt and Negri's Empire, specifically how it has provided a rich context for the lacunae of politics and education. Social theory movements, such as (neo)marxisms and poststructuralisms, may very well be viable... if they include nonhumans. The idea that solidarity is a fundamental aspect of reality means that students and teachers acting in the common interest are not just politically conscious, but more in-tune with our entirely codependent world(s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that although Eavan Boland’s Object Lessons has reached considerable achievements in terms of the visibility of women poets in the Irish literary landscape, her project expressed and reinforced the Mary Robinson moment of the early Celtic Tiger. The present ecologically endangered era calls for a critical reappraisal and a questioning of the subject-object dichotomy that lies at the heart of its argument. Many, if not most of the difficulties pointed out by Boland’s readers and the criticisms levelled at her work have as their point of departure the constitution of a feminine poetic subjectivity and the subsequently problematic nature of objects and nature created by the very gesture. While attributing subjectivity, and therefore agency, to women in poetry was certainly an indispensable breaking away from various forms of political and religious authority, new conceptual frameworks such as the new materialisms and object-oriented ontology have emerged since, that de-correlate agency from subjectivity, thus re-thinking altogether the status of objects. Drawing mostly from Timothy Morton’s application of object-oriented ontology to environmental matters, I show how reading Object Lessons without the subject-object distinction addresses some of the criticisms directed at Boland and highlights the ecological value of her poetic and prose work.

The empirical-transcendental debate in philosophy of technology, as debates go, took a turn toward the counterposing of the two perspectives, 'empirical'-pragmatic-pragmatist versus 'transcendental'-critical. Postphenomenology aligns itself with the former standpoint, and it is in this spirit that commentators have criticized it for its too-instrumentalist stance and lack of overarching, i.e., transcendental orientation. But the positions may have become too starkly delineated in order for the debate to reach any breakthrough: a seemingly unbridgeable gap yawns between the stances of 'technology with a small "t"' and 'Technology with a capital "T."' Is there any way to reorient the debate? In this paper I propose to do so by considering whether there would be some way of arriving from one end of the spectrum to the other—crossing the gap. Exploring the purported wasteland in between "technology" and "Technology" by way of object-oriented ontology (OOO)—Harman, Morton—we can find it actually filled with countless gaps, adhering to every thing. Following the radical insights of OOO, we'd have to attest to a 'thing-transcendentality.' The 'gap,' then, that seemed so threatening and all-encompassing, becomes smeared out, levelled down to a multiplicity of perspectives. And this casts the debate, with its purported strict tension between 'empirical' and 'transcendental' positions, in fresh terms, opening up new ways for studying how the two interrelate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ontological abyss that separates real objects from sensual objects is one of the central principles of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), which has its most explicit and profuse modulation in Timothy Morton’s notion of rift. This article argues that, despite succeeding in explaining the radical difference that inhabits every object, Morton’s rift fails to explain the object’s unification, rendering the overall theory inconsistent. An alternative approach that accounts simultaneously for disjunction and conjunction between essences and appearances can be found in Eugenio Trías’s philosophy of the limit, a term widely ignored in OOO despite its deeply non-relational conception of the reality of things. The article further argues that the reinterpretation of Trías’s twofold liminal approach in light of OOO successfully addresses the inconsistencies found in Morton’s rift, paving the way for a theory of limits within Harman’s ontological framework.

Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology has employed a variant of occasionalist causation since 2002, with sensual objects acting as the mediators of causation between real objects. While the mechanism for living beings creating sensual objects is clear, how nonliving objects generate sensual objects is not. This essay sets out an interpretation of occasionalism where the mediating agency of nonliving contact is the virtual particles of nominally empty space. Since living, conscious, real objects need to hold sensual objects as sub-components, but nonliving objects do not, this leads to an explanation of why consciousness, in Object-Oriented Ontology, might be described as doubly withdrawn: a sensual sub-component of a withdrawn real object.

Copyright of ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies is the property of Associacao Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Despite exerting considerable influence on other academic disciplines and mainstream environmental thought, object-oriented ontology has attracted little critical engagement from academic philosophers as a philosophy in its own right. Here, I address one aspect of this oversight by exploring Timothy Morton's claim that "being ecological" – cultivating the anticolonial and nonanthropocentric mindset to disrupt environmental crises – requires an object-oriented purview. Working against the backdrop of the Anthropocene, I firstly reconstruct Morton's two main arguments for the power and ecological promise of object-oriented ontology. With some help from (eco)feminist theory, I then argue that, despite its radically nonanthropocentric façade, object-oriented ontology retains some problematic aspects of the dualistic thinking that it rightly pits itself against. More specifically, because object-oriented ontology retains the absence/presence binary of the subject/object dualism as one of its basic metaphysical commitments, it appears destined to perpetuate an insidious anthropocentrism by either fetishizing or collapsing the alterity of the nonhuman things it aims to rethink. Object-oriented ontology seems, therefore, poorly suited to the task that Morton sets for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What it means to be human is inherently incomplete or in a state of permanent mutability. This is excellent for it opens the way to the questions of the inhuman, posthuman, and nonhuman to take center stage in the analysis of what it means to be a subject, which is a core question for education. The question of the inhuman at the core of the human is brought into focus in the work of the Slovenian School of Psychoanalysis, whose central Lacanian tenet refers to ontological negativity as irreducible. Reality is incomplete and contradictory entangled with the Real as its irreducible other. Timothy Morton's work on the non-human argues that theorizing solidarity with the non-human living world is possible, indeed inevitable, through thinking an ecological symbiosis of human and nonhuman, which necessarily disrupts our notions of Nature and our place in it at a fundamental level. Finally, the recent developments in the neurosciences, robotics, biogenetics and AI create the conditions ripe for speculation regarding the future of humans in radical ways. It will be argued that Malabou's notion of plasticity can address the questions pertaining to the non-human, posthuman, and the inhuman in essential ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at showing the consequences of Bruno Latour's endorsement of the anti-holist, "flat" ontology (an ontology that denies that difference in scale is an ontological difference) shared by many speculative realists. While this assumption presents notorious problems on the political side, it will be shown to have explicative and pragmatic potential when it comes to political ecology. After exploring his treatment of the concept of scale, which draws on Gabriel Tarde's monadological sociology, Latour's radical democraticism, for which scale depends only on the number of connections and "alliances" an actor is able to put into existence, will be compared to Timothy Morton's hyperobjects hypotheses, another ecology based on a peculiar treatment of the notion of scale, in order to show the advantages and the potential of Latour's ecology of fragility. The aim of Latour's politics is the composition of a common world, but this composition has no superior guarantor, and even Gaia, the holistic entity par excellence, cannot be brought into existence without an assembly of allies that Latour compares to a war declaration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I attempt to argue alongside Clayton Crockett that Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects can be extended to encompass every object, not merely those that are large in comparison to human beings. However, unlike Crockett who uses the works of Derrida and Lacan to achieve this goal, I turn to Husserl’s underdeveloped theory of hyletic phenomenology and hyle. Despite Husserl’s articulation of hyletic phenomenology ending as quickly as it is announced, I argue that three lessons can be learned from what Husserl does have to say about hyle. Specifically, hyle is non-intentional, it is co-constitutive of intentionality, and hyle contains the possibility of broadening our traditional understanding of objects. Taken together, I suggest that Husserl’s understanding of hyle caries considerable overlap with both Crockett and Morton’s understanding of hyperobjects.

This article considers the potential intersections of object-oriented ontology and science fiction studies by focusing on a particular type of science-fictional artifact, the category of ‘Big Dumb Objects.’ Big Dumb Objects is a terminology used—often quite playfully—to describe things or structures that are simultaneously massive in size and enigmatic in purpose: they stretch the imagination through both the technical aspects of their construction and the obscurity of their purpose. First used to designate the subjects of several science fiction novels written in the 1970s, Big Dumb Objects (often called BDOs) have been understood in terms of science fiction’s enduring interest in the technological sublime and the transcendental. While object-oriented ontology has often turned to science fiction and weird fiction for inspiration in rethinking the possibilities inherent in things and their relations, it has not considered the implications of BDOs for a theory of the object more broadly. The goal of this article is to consider how extreme size and representations of scale in science fiction can help expand an understanding of the object along lines that are similar to those pursued by object-oriented ontology, especially Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects.

In the center of attention of the authors of the article is Timothy Morton’s book «Being Ecological». The book is devoted to the problems of ecological awareness and lifestyle. Morton’s unusual approach develops the ideas of Graham Harman, Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger, but does not offer any panacea in the era of mass extinction. Morton rather questions our own concern about finding this panacea. In an era when the ecological lifestyle seems heroic and sublime, he tells us: «you are already ecological». The authors are trying to trace how Morton develops the concepts of Kant and Heidegger, giving them, with the help of object-oriented ontology, a new and actual interpretation

Johannes Heldéns Astroecology. A Mesh of Constellations and Gaps The article presents a discussion of this on going multimodal and multimedial work seen in relation to Timothy Morton’s ecological thinking. The artist’s outspoken interest in exploring what might happen between the combinations of the different modalities of his works is discussed within a frame of so-called ”liminal spaces”.

The article develops the notion of the 'hyperabject' – coined by Danish poet Theis Ørntoft – into a proper theoretical concept. The term hyperabject is a synthesis of Timothy Morton's concept of hyperobjects and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, and in the article we argue that the concept of the hyperabject entails a necessary critique of and correction to Morton's ecological thought, as well as various other versions of speculative realism, new materialism and object-oriented ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Have architects, by defining what they do and what they don't do, inhibited their ability to fully engage in creating new urban conditions that are computationally driven, ecologically sound and socially equitable? Dan Hill, Director of Strategic Design at the Swedish government's innovation agency Vinnova, illustrates some transdisciplinary initiatives that break the mould. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Henry Hudson has been largely overlooked by the ecocritical paradigm of recent decades, yet he stands out as one of the most prominent voices of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century environmentalism. His fiction and nonfiction alike are characterized by Romanticism and nostalgia for what is perceived as a vanishing realm of pristine nature, as well as by a critique of anthropogenic exploitation of animals and their natural habitats. This fusion of Romanticism and environmentalism is interesting when considered in the light of current ecocritical scholarship. This article examines how it is possible to read the inherent environmentalism of Hudson's work as exhibiting a form of ecological in congruence with the thinking of current ecocritical scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article raises the issue of Raymond Murray Schafer"s soundscape, its agency and its anthropocentric perspective. The author of the article juxtaposes the acoustic ecology and Timothy Morton"s ecology without Nature and notes the first- and thirdperson relationship forming between the human and the sound in Schafer"s model. The way to overcome the distance seems to be adopting the zero-person perspective and applying the hyperobject model for describing the correlations between humans and non-humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The plant has recently emerged as a battleground of conflicting ecocriticisms. ‘Dark Ecology’ is, in the works of Timothy Morton, an ecocritical hermeneutic, in which the world can be subtracted into the parts of objects, of the plant, and of any leaf that exceeds the totality of abstract ‘Nature’. In dividing the whole into the parts, and combining the parts into an imminently subtracted whole, he has recommended a negative dialectic of virtual objects that can be collected into a ‘hyperobject’. This dialectic can, however, be argued to dissolve any whole into parts, and render the hyperobject internally fissured. We can, from the ‘darkness’ of this fissure, begin to read Nature according to the ‘via plantare’, that is, a mystical way of desiring an other as plant so as to know and love the visible light of the invisible God. ‘Vegetal difference’, the difference of the plant from the animal, should, I argue, be read for theology as a finite reflection of the divine difference of the Holy Trinity in a Trinitarian Ontology, in which the originary difference of the Son from the Father is related through the Holy Spirit, and given again in accelerating gratuity—like the light of the leaf that shines forth from any flower.