what I’m writing about tonight

Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought

Since Morton talks about “the mesh,” and since for him the ecological thought is none other than “everything is connected,” the question has understandably been asked as to whether this is a pre-object-oriented residue in Morton’s thought that he has now disowned.

I would say no. “Everything is connected” can mean one of two different things:

1. Holism

2. Flat ontology

While #1 is perhaps the more natural meaning of the phrase, Morton explicitly disowns it on around page 31 (I’m guessing from memory, but it was somewhere in the 30’s). [ADDENDUM: I just checked. It’s actually page 35.] Morton is not a holist any more than he’s an environmentalist. And that brings us to #2…

Flat ontology. What Morton really seems to mean by “everything is connected” is simply that flowers and rainbows are interwoven into the same mesh as styrofoam cups, plutonium, guitar players, and so forth. It’s a basically Latourian point about the inability to divide the world ontologically into “natural” and “cultural” zones.

I’ll have to hear Tim’s views on this later, but I don’t see how he can be read as a holist in this 2010 book. Despite a few passages leaning in that direction, he disdains holism fairly explicitly.