"What is a book?" This is the question the text starts of with and the question the text circles around, exploring the material basis of reading and writing. Parallel to the theoretical examination and anecdotal reference to the history of the written word, the author positions a post-apocalyptic fiction about the last reader.
In this passionate, lucid, and surprising book, Timothy Morton argues that all forms of life are connected in a vast, entangling mesh. This interconnectedness penetrates all dimensions of life. No being, construct, or object can exist independently from the ecological entanglement, Morton contends, nor does “Nature” exist as an entity separate from the uglier or more synthetic elements of life. Realizing this interconnectedness is what Morton calls the ecological thought.
In three concise chapters, Morton investigates the profound philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of the fact that all life forms are interconnected. As a work of environmental philosophy and theory, The Ecological Thought explores an emerging awareness of ecological reality in an age of global warming. Using Darwin and contemporary discoveries in life sciences as root texts, Morton describes a mesh of deeply interconnected life forms—intimate, strange, and lacking fixed identity.
A “prequel” to his Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Harvard, 2007), The Ecological Thought is an engaged and accessible work that will challenge the thinking of readers in disciplines ranging from critical theory to Romanticism to cultural geography.
(Source: Harvard University Press catalog)
Thinking the ecological thought is difficult: it involves becoming open, radically open -- open forever, without the possibility of closing again. Studying art provides a platform, because the environment is partly a matter of perception.
The ecological thought must imagine economic change; otherwise it's just another piece on the game board of capitalist ideology.
Meditation means exposing our conceptual fixations and exploring the openness of the mesh.
How to care for the neighbor, the strange stranger, and the hyper-object, are the long-term problems posed by the ecological thought.
Maria Angel and Anna Gibbs explore the new materialism of the corporeal body in electronic writing and online environments. They argue that electronic environments have a strong relationship with affective modes of communication highlighted by their appeal to sensory novelty through technological innovation—new media platforms proliferate the potentials for combining visibility with aural and tactile modes. Their essay argues for a new materialism in electronic culture, one that has serious implications for the way that we understand memory.
(Source: Beyond the Screen, introduction by Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla)