Ecocriticism

Abstract

   The task of the author’s project “ecology without nature” is to use deconstruction to counteract prevailing normative ideas about nature for the sake of sentient beings suffering under catastrophic environmental conditions. Timothy Morton sees in the very idea of nature itself one of the obstacles to truly ecological politics, ethics, philosophy, and art. He calls for a thorough study of how nature is defined as a transcendental, unified and independent category. The study of how art represents the environment makes it possible to see that “nature” is an arbitrary rhetorical construct, devoid of a truly independent existence outside or beyond texts about nature. The rhetoric of nature itself depends on an ambient poetics, that is directed toward the evocation of the surrounding atmosphere or the world through text. Morton shows that people at different periods of time put various ideological meanings into the concept of “nature”; the historicization of this poetics makes obvious its vacuity of inner being and independent value. The history of ambient poetics depends on certain forms of identity and subjectivity, which are also historical. Without stopping at historicization, the author calls for the politicization of ecological art and the use of the rhetorical effect of “nature” as a slogan in order to strengthen environmentalism. The ecological thinking that Morton calls for does not operate with “nature” as a kind of ready-made, ideological concept and thus emerges as an ecology “without nature”. On the other hand, a non-conceptual image in environmental literature can be a convincing point of attraction for an intensive conceptual system — namely, an ideological one.