Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology

Timothy Morton

Abstract. The further scholarship investigates life forms (ecology,

evolutionary biology and microbiology) the less those forms can be
said to have a single, independent and lasting identity. The further
scholarship delves into texts (deconstruction) the less they too can be
said to have a single, independent and lasting identity. This similarity is
not simply an analogy. Life forms cannot be said to differ in a rigorous
way from texts. On many levels and for many reasons, deconstruction
and ecology should talk to one another.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed

with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the
bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms
crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these
elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other,
and dependent on each other in so complex a manner,
have all been produced by laws acting around us. (Charles
Darwin, The Origin of Species, 395–396)

One thing that modernity has damaged, along with the environment,
has been thinking. To bring thinking to a point at which the damage
can be assessed will require us to use the broken tools to hand. One
damaged concept is ‘Nature’ — I capitalise it to denature it — damaged
and damaging, almost useless for developing ecological culture. Of
far greater benefit would be concepts that ruthlessly denature and
de-essentialise: they are called deconstruction. In this essay, we shall

The Oxford Literary Review 32.1 (2010): 1–17

Edinburgh University Press
DOI: 10.3366/E0305149810000611
© The Oxford Literary Review
www.eupjournals.com/olr
2 Oxford Literary Review

descend from generalities about deconstruction and ecology, through a

close reading of an environmental (but not environmentalist) poem by
Charles Bernstein, and then further down into the very basic flickering
of language that constitutes the environment as such, which Derrida
calls the re-mark.
Ecology and deconstruction are intimately related, but since this is
not well recognised, we must begin with crude approximations dating
from the 1960s, when deconstruction and environmentalism emerged
in their different ways. The essay thus uses the word ‘text’ in the special
way that indicates a proximity to Ferdinand de Saussure. In the Course
in General Linguistics, Saussure gives a precise environmental defini-
tion of the linguistic sign: ‘The value of just any term is accordingly
determined by its environment; it is impossible to fix even the value of
the word signifying “sun” without first considering its surroundings: in
some languages it is not possible to say “sit in the sun” ’.1 Signs are inter-
dependent. The existence of a sign implies coexistence with other signs.
Semiotic interrelation cannot be a bounded structure. The text-
context distinction is only an interpretive convenience. It is not that
texts refer to other texts, or coexist with them — rather, texts are other
texts: texting is the differential process by which and as which texts
exist as such, as strangers to themselves. Text dismantles distinctions
between a ‘within’ and a ‘without’. Or, we find that the distinction is
weirdly fractured and repeated at many levels, like looking at a fractal,
say the coastline of Norway. The closer one looks, the more crinkly
the boundary between Norway and the North Sea becomes. ‘Text’ is
precisely the word for this fractal weaving of boundaries that open onto
the unbounded: it is not the case that nothing at all exists. Nothingness
would at any rate provide a firm epistemological foothold — one error
that prevents ecological criticism from embracing deconstruction is
the misperception of deconstruction as nihilism. The boundary is not
nonexistent but not thin — it is thick, permeable, folded into itself,
fragile, teeming with parasites. Like skin.

Extended Phenotype, Extended Phenotext

Text as ecology is a good metaphor. But thinking can go much
further than this, since if the text has no thin, rigid boundary, what
it includes, what it touches, must also consist of life forms, Earth itself,
and so on. The difference between what counts as a mere metaphor
Timothy Morton 3

and what counts as non-metaphorical reality collapses when thinking

engages text seriously. There is no finer example of textuality than
Charles Darwin’s image of the entangled bank, which brings The
Origin of Species to a close (see the epigraph).2 Darwin constantly
revises of the trope of Book of Nature: it is illegible in places, pages
are missing, sentences are fragmented, words fluctuate before our eyes.3
As Darwin reads it, the Book of Nature transitions from work to text.
Darwin and Derrida have such a close affinity: it is remarkable that
Derrida performs nothing like a seriously detailed reading of Darwin,
referring to him only tangentially, though the references are scattered
throughout his work.4 It is nevertheless the case that Derrida recognises
the colossal impact of Darwin. Like Copernicus and Freud, writes
Derrida, Darwin forced a great humiliation upon humans — literally,
a bringing closer to the earth — by calling to mind the displacement
from an ontological center that constitutes the human as such. Derrida
goes so far as to claim that Darwin performs the greatest humiliation.5
Julia Kristeva formulates environmental textuality as genotext, which
like genotype (from which it derives) is the genome of the text, the
factors that produce it like an algorithm or recipe produces a set of
results. This genotext includes the ecological environment: ‘[Genotext]
will include semiotic processes but also the advent of the symbolic. The
former includes drives, their disposition and their division of the body,
plus the ecological and social system surrounding the body, such as
objects and pre-Oedipal relations with parents. The latter encompasses
the emergence of object and subject, and the constitution of nuclei of
meaning involving categories: semantic and categorical fields’.6 Texts
have environments. These environments are made of signs, yet the
matter-sign distinction breaks down at a certain point, because one
of these environments is the environment. There is more than a neat
chiasmic symmetry here, a strange entanglement in which we cannot
distinguish between what counts as an entity ‘in’ an environment
and an entity ‘in’ a text. For if we are to think text rigorously, we
end up with Derrida’s famous formulation ‘Il n’ y a pas d’hors-texte,’
‘There is no outside-text’.7 No textuality can rigorously distinguish
between inside and outside, because that is precisely what textuality
both broaches and breeches.
Derrida’s formulation that there is no outside-text is not a
nominalism that claims that things only exist insofar as we designate
4 Oxford Literary Review

them. It is a deep and expanded form of empiricism.8 For truly

empiricism is the study of relationships between things, and of things
as sets of relationships, rather than solid seeming objects separated by
empty seeming space. The fractals touched upon just now provide
a different way of thinking materialism. The original fractal was the
Cantor set, produced by continually removing the middle third of a
line, and so on to infinity: this continual operation is an algorithm.
What remains is Cantor dust, a set of infinity points and infinity no-
points — two infinities; Georg Cantor got into trouble for discovering
different kinds of infinity such as this. The trouble with fractals, the
trouble that hippie kitsch obscures, is that they elegantly show how
nature is not natural, not outside artifice.
At The University of California at Davis, Evolution 101 courses
begin with a study of algorithms: repeated sets of mechanical
calculations. All the way down to the sub-DNA level, evolution is
a set of algorithmic processes. That is the disturbing thing about
‘animals’ — they are vegetables. (Movie monsters such as zombies
often resemble animated plants.) Our prejudice about vegetables is
that they’re beings that only do one thing — grow.9 The trouble with
vegetable growth is that it consists of sets of algorithms — iterated
functions, often producing fractal shapes.10
Kristeva, a mathematician, should be interested in how forms we
used to see as ‘natural,’ inhabiting a realm ‘outside’ culture, a realm
that is chaotic or unstructured, are in fact highly ordered when
considered as iterations of fractal algorithms. (Ordered, not ‘designed’.
Like ‘evolution’ text just happens.) Fractals are simply the cheapest way
of producing structure, and evolution always takes the cheapest possible
route. Thus blood vessels, leaves, branches, forests and cancer cells have
a fractal dimensionality. Far from being a holistic New Age trip, fractals
open up a traumatic dimension of what we cannot call Nature any
more, a dimension that is not holistic, but open and strange. The
curious thing about forests is that one can accurately estimate how
many trees they have by studying the pattern of branches and twigs on
just one tree. Forests appear ‘natural’, yet they follow the quite logical
order of algorithms programmed by tree genomes. An algorithm is a
script — a text — that automates a function, or functions, and in this
case the script is encoded directly into matter. The matter–information
boundary is permeable. Consider The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants,
Timothy Morton 5

a beautiful text readily available online.11 Instead of illustrating plants,

one can generate algorithms that assemble them when one hits the
Return key. Does this not mean that plants as such are an algorithmic
process? Plant scientists prefer modeling plant growth using software
resembling what the authors developed. If an algorithm can produce a
rose by plotting a set of equations, surely the thing itself is a map of its
genome, a ‘plot’ of an algorithm’s unfolding?
A flower is a map of a genomic function in some sort of phase
space (the space of all the possible plots based on the algorithm that
generated it). The base of the flower where it meets the stem is a
snapshot of the past of the algorithm, while the crinkly edges of the
petals show what the algorithm was up to yesterday. Looking at life
forms is never looking at the here and now, and never looking in
one place; they are palimpsests of displacements and rewritings and
iterations. ‘Nature’, that sign of the extra-textual, does not strictly exist,
even in biological terms. Think of the rings of a tree. One’s face is a
map of everything that happened to it. We can abandon all variations
of Romantic vitalism — believing in a vital spark separate from the
material organisation of life forms. Material organisation turns out to
be sets of formal relationships, not palpable stuff.
When we zoom into life forms, we discover textuality. This
recursivity is far more disturbing than a Yin-Yang model that
presupposes some metaphysical harmony between opposites. There
is no metaphysical harmony between text and ecology: no neutral
seeming background against which a Yin and a Yang appear as
wedded together, since text and environment include all phenomena
in their respective fields. This absence of a background has striking
epistemological and ethical-political effects, as anyone should know
who has wrestled with someone hostile to ‘theory’. Moreover, the
globally warming Earth is similarly disturbing: there is no longer
any background (‘environment’, ‘weather,’ Nature and so on) against
which human activity may differentiate itself. Deconstruction that
precisely articulates how distinctions along such lines are metaphysical
will prove beneficial in navigating our way through the madness that is
the recognition that there is no ‘Big Other’ — no world as such.
The textuality of life forms is the genome — DNA and other
replicator molecules. A rabbit is not really a rabbit. It is not that
a rabbit by any other name would act as nose-twitchy. All the way
6 Oxford Literary Review

down, there is no rabbit, no rabbit flavored DNA. And all the way
up: rabbits act like rabbits, and thus pass on their genome. This is
called ‘satisficing’, a form of performativity.12 If a life form does its
thing without dying, its descendant can keep whatever it does. The
fact that homosexuals exist across a vast array of sexually reproducing
life forms, for instance, indicates that evolution has no problem with
them. In fact, heterosexual behavior floats on top of a vast ocean
of cloning, transgender switching, homosexuality and intersexuality.13
A genome could not care less if its vehicle acts like someone else’s idea
of a rabbit. This includes having mutations that not all rabbits might
have. There is no essence called race, or gender, or species. The Origin
of Species really argues that there is no origin, just as there is no origin
of text.
For Darwin, ‘species’ is entirely specious, just as for a
poststructuralist, a ‘work’ is a reification of textuality. One cannot
rigidly distinguish one species from another; or a species from a variant;
or a variant from a monstrosity.14 The nonexistence of species as such
is enough to end the concept of race, but Darwin went further in The
Descent of Man, arguing that non-utiliatarian sexual selection is why
people look different.15 The category of ‘race’ is itself racist. Racism is
precisely acting as if race were a foundational category.
Common environmentalist ideology asserts that adaptation means
life forms fitting environments in nice organic ways. Yet there is no
environment as such to fit — it is a moving target consisting of life
forms constantly adapting to other life forms. Claiming that ducks have
webbed feet because webbed feet are a perfect adaptation to a watery
environment is the error of ‘adaptationism’. Coots have no webbed
feet; coots exist; evolution does not care about webbed feet. Yet week
after week television shows portray animals as ‘wonderfully adapted’
for whatever: adaptationism is teleological. I might as well have been
born with six fingers, or three. Anxious on behalf of teleology, Alfred
Russel Wallace pressured Darwin to insert ‘survival of the fittest’ into
The Origin of Species.16 The hopelessly reactionary version that ‘fittest’
means having six-pack abs is evidently false; nor does ‘fittest’ mean
‘being wonderfully adapted to this or that purpose’. It only means
‘happening not to have died before you could reproduce’.
Humans share 98% of their genome with chimpanzees, and 35%
with daffodils (Wordsworth eat your heart out). But it gets stranger
Timothy Morton 7

than that: there is no DNA flavored DNA. DNA is a hybrid palimpsest

of additions, deletions, viral code insertions and so on: there is no
way to ascertain whether one piece of DNA is more ‘authentic’ than
another. Moreover, in order to have DNA one needs ribosomes, and
in order to have ribosomes, one needs DNA. To resolve the circularity,
there must have been a strange ‘pre-living’ condition that biologist
Sol Spiegelman calls RNA World. In RNA World pieces of what we
now call RNA, the molecule that translates DNA for the ribosomes
(the enzyme factories in each cell), hitched a ride on a non-organic
replicant such as a silicate crystal.17 Life as textuality leaks through the
life–non-life boundary.
Life forms consist of all kinds of structures that are not very organic,
just as there are strange textual forms that do not fit the Procrustean bed
of organicism. Humans keep trying to distinguish rigorously between
the living and the machinic. Countless sci-fi and horror narratives
explore the anxiety that this distinction is untenable. Darwinism and
genomics are very bad news for this anxiety, since they show that
not only is the distinction untenable, but life as such is a machinic,
algorithmic functioning, and that what we call ‘life’ and ‘consciousness’
are emergent effects of more fundamental machine-like processes.
Now consider how life forms are interrelated — ecology. The theory
of symbiosis, for example, explored in depth by Lynn Margulis and
others, includes relationships between different life forms at all scales.
Symbionts exist within us, not just around us (endosymbiosis) — we
are not ourselves, if by that we mean independent and singular
beings, but are made up of others. Our mitochondria, for instance,
are symbionts hiding from their own catastrophe, the environmental
disaster called oxygen. Many cell walls are double, hinting at some
ancient symbiotic coupling. Likewise, texts consist of other texts: there
is no text as such — textuality is shot through with otherness — and
every text, at the very same time, is utterly unique, a unicity that
transcends independent singular isolation.
ERV-3 is an endogenous human retrovirus, a virus-like entity
that is part of human DNA, like a random poem by Chaucer
inserted in a Shakespeare anthology. This retrovirus may code for
immunosuppressive properties of the placental barrier: you are reading
this because a virus in your mother’s DNA possibly prevented her from
spontaneously aborting you.18 Several levels of magnification above
8 Oxford Literary Review

this, the host-parasite distinction has already broken down. Snail shell
size may be a function of fluke genes, since the shell is a phenotype that
snails share with their fluke parasites. Fluke genes will even influence
snails lacking fluke parasites, appearing to control their behavior. Ti
plasmids manipulate their bacterial hosts to enable trees to produce
galls in which insects live. Meanwhile the plant tissue that generates the
gall appears to have been produced for the sake of the insect. Shrimp
are manipulated by flukes, which in turn manipulate the ducks that
feed on the shrimp.19
Just as textuality smears the text–context boundary into aporia, if not
oblivion, so the genomics version of ecological interrelatedness requires
us to drop the organism–environment duality. This is the view of the
‘extended phenotype’: DNA is not limited to the physical boundaries
of life forms, but rather expresses itself in and as what we call ‘the
environment.’ The expression of beaver DNA does not stop at the
ends of beaver whiskers but at the ends of beaver dams. Spider DNA is
expressed in spider webs. Dropping the organism–environment duality
is potentially very beneficial — first, it is accurate, and accuracy allows
for better decisions. Secondly, as Derrida says of narcissism, there
is no one organism, but only relatively extended and non-extended
phenotypes.20
The extended phenotype view de-aestheticises life forms, who
according to environmental ideology are bounded things nestled
within their bounded niches, a word derived from sculpture.
The sense of surroundings as niche becomes more labile and
dynamic in ecophenomenology derived from Merleau-Ponty; yet
the basic foreground–background duality persists. The view of the
extended phenotype drastically expands what environmentalism — qua
protecting ‘habitats’ — must think and do, because there is no niche
as opposed to organism; there is only the genome and the biosphere.
Animals with rabies are compelled to bite — is this because rabies DNA
codes for biting in the affected animal? Do people sneeze because
they are trying to get rid of a cold virus, or because rhinoviral DNA
codes for sneezing to propagate itself? As microbiologists Kwang W.
Jeon and James F. Danielli state, ‘Organisms and genomes may . . . be
regarded as compartments of the biosphere through which genes in
general circulate’ such that ‘the whole of the gene pool of the biosphere
is available to all organisms’.21 In the same way, textuality allows us to
Timothy Morton 9

think an ‘extended phenotext’ that does not stop at the front and back
pages of a printed work.
The environment is just a name for a flickering, shimmering field
of forces without independent existence and in constant flux. Yet life
forms are also made from their environments, including sunshine and
chemicals from exploding stars. There is no way rigidly to separate the
biosphere and the non-biosphere. If the Earth had no magnetic field,
for instance, life forms would be sizzled by solar winds: one good sign of
extra-terrestrial life is planets with magnetic fields. As if life, once it gets
going, includes all that goes around it and before it: terrestrial oxygen
and iron are bi-products of bacterial metabolism, and hills are made of
crushed shells and bones. Just as writing, when it gets going, includes
everything around it too, as if things were always already ‘written’
before people started doing things with pens: dispersed, displaced,
never self-identical, infinite like a Menger Sponge or a Cantor Set, full
of absence and space. Moreover, just as text is texting, space is spacing,
absence is absence-ing — endless unfoldings, translations, distortions,
misreadings, mutations.
A mechanical functioning, but one that is full of errors, constant
rewritings of code; code that is also message, message that is also contact
(in Jakobson’s terminology).22 The radical consequence of genomics
is that materiality and information are not separate, or in Jakobson’s
terms, contact and message are one. Hard to distinguish then, between
what is human and what is ‘post’ — the prefix sighs with relief, as if,
thank heavens, the Humanities can eject the disturbing baggage of the
human as such: it may well be the case that this turn is predicated on,
among other things, a too hasty burial of deconstruction (now that its
first exponent is no longer alive). Such an ejection of the human plays
into the hands of the religious right and the ‘culture of [bare] life’.
Cleansed of the subjectivity that now acts as an irritant, the modern
normotic personality seeks solace in a world without an inside.23 If this
is the truth of ‘There is no outside-text’ then I should like to relocate
to another planet, please. Darwinism frees the mind for an ethics
and politics based not on soulless authoritarianism, but on intimacy
with coexisting strange others (Autrui), because Darwinism shows how
utterly flimsy and contingent and non-teleological the biosphere is.
For Darwinism there is no lifeworld as such. In the words of
Yoko Ono, ‘This is not here’.24 Lifeworld is strictly delimited to
10 Oxford Literary Review

experience, not ontology. This limitation curtails the bad circularity

of phenomenological justifications for ecological (in)action. The
gratifying illusion of immersion in a lifeworld provides yet another way
to hold out against the truth of global warming: it has been put to me
on more than one occasion that only internally poor white Westerners,
lacking a lifeworld, could think such a thing as global warming, whereas
the Third World peasant, immersed in her lifeworld like a pair of Van
Gogh shoes, has no need for such concepts. As the recent actions to
mark the surpassing of a human-friendly limit of atmospheric CO2
have suggested, however, peasants are far from incapable of holding
more than one idea and one place in mind at a time.25 In contrast,
the view that starts from the fact of intimacy with coexisting strangers
compels us to assume responsibility for global warming, a direct cause
of the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction Event.
Since contact and message are the same, art that short-circuits the
message and contact (which I call ambient) would definitively evoke
environmentality, even when it is not strictly ‘environmental’.26 How
might this environmentality manifest?

Writing Ecology
Is it a poem or not?
this poem intentionally left blank
There it is, floating alone on the page.27 Charles Bernstein’s poem
is a witty allusion to US forms. Mortgage contracts contain blank
pages on which appears the phrase ‘THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY
LEFT BLANK’. The poem alludes to legalistic nicety that leaves no
page unwritten. The informal-looking lowercase letters reinforce the
impression, shouting quietly not to pay any attention to them. What
the poem says blatantly contradicts what it is, and yet, at another level,
the language conjures the blankness of the page — an illocutionary
statement, like ‘I now pronounce you man and wife.’
The poem does what Mallarmé started in Un Coup de Dés: turning
the page into a rubber sheet to stretch and compress. After him, all
poems become Mallarmé poems. It is as if, like Einstein, Mallarmé
discovered that space is curved: always warped, never really ‘blank’.
Mallarmé pointed out what was there all along; we only forgot to look.
Timothy Morton 11

All poems are environmental, because they include the spaces in which
they are written and read — blank space around and between words,
silence within the sound.
Is this a poem? The poem itself inscribes that question, opening
up space even as it inserts language into space. Martin Heidegger
maintains that where bridges cross a stream, one becomes aware of
the stream.28 Bernstein opens up space as questioning expectancy. This
expectancy is aperture, the feeling of beginning. Aristotle’s claim that
artworks have a beginning, middle, and end is experiential: works
of art have a feeling of beginning, a feeling of middle, a feeling of
ending. We are familiar with closure: loose ends being tied up, plot
lines converging, a sense of simplicity and death. So what is aperture?
Precisely. ‘What is it?’ is aperture. How can we know when we have
begun? Ambient art emphasises this uncertain feeling. Minimalism, for
example: where does the work of art begin if there’s no frame around
it — and if the work is only a frame with a blank, we are left with the
same question.
One could paraphrase the poem as ‘Don’t read me, I’m irrelevant.’
Like the Cretan liar paradox (‘I am lying’) it is both true and untrue
simultaneously. The poem’s recursivity reinforces this, like Willard
Van Orman Quine’s sentences that ‘mention’ rather than ‘use’
language:
IS NOT A COMPLETE SENTENCE IS NOT A
COMPLETE SENTENCE
This is indeed a complete sentence, but it asserts that the phrase ‘Is not
a complete sentence’ isn’t one. The poem seems strangely self-aware. Is
it artificially intelligent? Are we? Is sentience this recursive algorithmic
process? Maybe meaning and even ‘intention’ are in the eye of the
beholder. Whether they are pro-AI or anti, science and philosophy
claim that consciousness is intentional. What if intentionality were an
effect of performance? What if it was ‘over there’, in language itself, not
‘in here’, inside me, my most precious possession? If this poem is self
aware, why couldn’t worms be?
The poem is not about bunny rabbits, mountains, or pollution. It
engages with a more fundamental level of existence, or coexistence. The
poem compels its surroundings to become part of it, like a life form
sucking in nutrients. But is it ‘alive’? Are we? Bernstein provocatively
12 Oxford Literary Review

undermines beliefs that art is organic, living, squishy. Yet the poem is
organic: it does what it says, and says what it does. In its formulaic,
algorithmic quality, it erases distinctions between life and non-life. As
Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy says, this is life, Jim, but not as we know it: a
strange artificial life, Life 2.0. As Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek argues, Life 2.0 implies
that life as such was already ‘Life 1.0’, artificial life.29
Ecology makes us contemplate these profound issues: abandon
the old idea of Nature; forget about worlds and surroundings — this
language forces false distinctions between inside and outside; rethink
‘life’; question ‘intelligence’ and ‘consciousness’. All these demands
emerge from Bernstein’s deceptively simple poem, which makes a slit
in our complacency, so beautifully placed, so gentle, that everything
comes pouring out of it.
Ambient art is only sometimes about rabbits and mountains, but is
always about aperture, the uncertainty that marks beginning as such.
An uncanny recursive form unfolds: wondering whether the poem has
begun, whether it is a title without a poem, or a poem without a title.
The first word, ‘this’, points to itself. Realist stories often begin with the
definite article: ‘The studio . . . ’ (Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray).30
Which studio? Why this one — the one we seem to be in, in the magic
time bubble created by that one word, ‘The’. Realism is minimalism —
less is more. The phrase ‘this poem’ makes us think, which one? This
one, the one we have already started — the effect resembles ‘Don’t
think of a pink elephant.’ ‘This’ points away from and towards itself
simultaneously.
Ping an sich
Does ‘intentionally’ leaving something blank leave space as it is,
or introduce blankness into it? Strangely, according to the second
possibility, we can introduce blank space into blank space. The ‘blank’
itself — is it transparent or is it opaque? A blankness that lets things
be, or something like whitewash? If it ever existed ‘before’ the poem
pointed it out, the blank page is never totally blank. Space is already
distorted. Significance is already taking place.
This is how ambient art explores the re-mark, a term in Derrida’s
meditations on whether we can truly discriminate between writing and
painting.31 Can we ensure that an array of squiggles is insignificant?
What is the smallest indicator that we are in a zone of meaning? In the
Timothy Morton 13

Charlie Brown cartoons, the bird Woodstock speaks in little vertical

lines, like blades of grass. We can tell that it is speech at all, simply
because Charles Schulz puts a speech bubble around the marks. The re-
mark says, ‘Hey! These things you’re looking at are marks.’ But does the
speech bubble not require another mark, a set of cartoon conventions,
for instance?
This ‘Hey!’ is what in Internet vocabulary is called a ping, a signal
to a remote server to ascertain whether or not the server is functioning.
The term is derived from echolocation (sonar). There is an infinite
regress potential here, since a minimal mark that ‘pings’ to echo the
functionality of a system depends upon an already functioning system
of meaning, an already inscribed surface. This risk of infinite regress
plagues systems-theoretical accounts of life and consciousness, accounts
that bypass deconstruction. The history of the bypass, running parallel
with Derrida from the mid-sixties, would include such figures as
George Spencer-Brown, Douglas Hofstadter and Francisco Varela.32
Spencer-Brown’s ‘Mark’ differs from Derrida’s contemporaneous re-
mark.33 The Mark decisively distinguishes one state from another (it
functions like a logical NOR gate, the minimal cybernetic logic gate);
the re-mark is a heuristic device that demonstrates the impossibility of
ever successfully distinguishing one state from another.
‘Mark’ seems nicely poised between accident and deliberation,
drawing and writing. Spencer-Brown’s symbol appears to differ
minimally from itself, like a small letter /r/, a right angle that elbows
into blank space. Yet although the Mark as concept is decisively on this
side of signification, the sign ‘Mark’ and its graphic symbol are more
ambiguous, making the boundary between this and that side as fuzzy
as possible. But since that side (the a-signifying side) may only appear
in contrast to this side, the distinction re-emerges at another level.
The Mark appears in a field that is paradoxically already ‘Marked’: an
infinite regress.
The systems-theoretical approach, embraced too swiftly by
posthumanism, cannot account for the infinite regress of writing and
writable surface. Bedazzled by the possibility of autotelic systems,
posthumanism forgets that what makes a system systematic is its
irreducible inconsistency. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is an
account of why systems need to be inconsistent in order to be coherent;
in a sense Gödel’s Theorem is deconstruction in mathematical form.
14 Oxford Literary Review

This is indeed a profoundly ecological notion. Ultimately all life forms

are subject to ‘Gödelisation’ (some entity or other could undermine
their coherency). All life forms (systems to be sure) are limited and
inconsistent — another way of saying that we are all fragile, mortal
entities coexisting haphazardly: a good beginning for an ethics.
Isn’t ping what a virus says? A virus is a chemical version of a
Henkin sentence: ‘This is information: make some copies of me’; ‘This
genome left intentionally blank’.34 Viruses are nothing more than giant
crystals acting as recursive code strings that undermine the coherence
of the system in which they are read (Gödelisation), like hypothetical
gramophone records called ‘I Cannot be Played on This Record Player,’
whose sympathetic vibrations destroy the player.35 Are viruses alive like
bacteria are, let alone the slight variants called mammals? Even viruses
have more simple ancestors. What was said about RNA World also
goes for Bernstein’s un-poem. It is a pre-poetic poem, a piece of self-
referential code stuck to another replicating medium (the page). To
this extent language is a viroid, not a virus: a pre-viral string of code,
a relic of RNA World persisting in the present as, for instance, Potato
Spindle Tuber Viroids that possess a mere 359 letter genome. At some
level, the genome is simply highly reproducible scribble that pings other
replicators.
There is no ping an sich. Ping is, onomomatopoeically, a wave
bouncing off a material form — hence the ambiguity of the neologism
‘to ping’ (transitive). Just as echolocation implies material surfaces
already inscribed with textures, with differences, including the air in
which the sound waves travel, so writing precedes speech, if ‘precedes’
has any meaning here.
What we call life is marked by the recursive traces of an ‘on’
state. What we call poetry, in Heidegger’s plangent language, is the
same — the ‘peal of the stillness of the dif-ference’.36 Obscured by the
Germanic pine needles and the snow globe coziness of Heidegger’s
exemplary Trakl poem, this peal is the phatic ping, yet only in
retrospect. We cannot tell whether Bernstein’s is a poem until after
we read ‘this . . . ’. We are unable to tell whether there is a life form
until after it has mutated. We cannot call it a species until it looks
like one. To be aware of the trace as such is to coexist with the radically
unknowable: Derrida’s arrivant, opening a realm of the infinitely other,
an otherness that is intimately ‘here’, under our skin — it is our skin,
Timothy Morton 15

teeming with symbionts — even as it evaporates ‘here’ into an infinite

network of traces.37 Life, intentionality, even consciousness might
all be intersubjective aftereffects of more ‘fundamental’ differential
processes — though ‘fundamental’ is not quite appropriate, since the
surface–depth manifold does not operate in this style of thinking.
When life, when writing, has begun, we find ourselves unable to draw
a thin, rigid line around it. Ecology thinks a limitless system with no
center or edge, devoid of intrinsic essence (no ‘Nature’): calligraphy as
biology. So does poetry. This is not here.

Notes
1
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, edited by Charles Bally and
Albert Sechehaye, translated by Wade Baskin (New York and London: McGraw
Hill, 1965), 35.
2
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, edited by Gillian Beer (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
3
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (London:
Phoenix, 2005), 266–7; Darwin, Origin, 34, 100, 141, 251; Gillian Beer,
Introduction in Darwin, Origin, xix.
4
See Colin Milburn, ‘Monsters in Eden: Darwin and Derrida’, Modern Language
Notes 118 (2003): 603–621.
5
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, edited by Marie-Louise Mallet,
translated by David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 136.
6
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, translated by Margaret Waller, in
The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 89–136
(120).
7
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore and London: the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 158.
8
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 161–2.
9
There is not enough space here to do justice to Geoffrey Bennington’s powerful
exploration of this theme in the anonymously published ‘Personal Growth’, Oxford
Literary Review 23 (2002), 137–52, special ‘Monstrism’ issue.
10
Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York: W.H. Freeman,
1983).
11
Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz and Aristid Lindenmayer, The Algorithmic Beauty of
Plants, with James S. Hanan, F. David Fracchia, Deborah Fowler, Martin
J. M. de Boer, and Lynn Mercer (Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, 2004); available at
algorithmicbotany.org/papers/.
16 Oxford Literary Review
12
Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 156.
13
Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature
and People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
14
See Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2010), chapter 2.
15
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, introduced
by James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Penguin, 2004).
16
Dawkins, Extended Phenotype, 179–180.
17
Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale, 581–94; Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea:
Evolution and the Meanings of Life (London: Penguin, 1996), 157–158.
18
Mark T. Boyd, Christopher M.R. Bax, Bridget E. Bax, David L. Bloxam, and
Robin A. Weiss, ‘The Human Endogenous Retrovirus ERV-3 is Upregulated in
Differentiating Placental Trophoblast Cells’, Virology 196 (1993), 905–909.
19
Dawkins, Extended Phenotype, 200–223, 226.
20
Jacques Derrida, ‘There Is No One Narcissism’, Points: Interviews, 1974–1994
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 196–215.
21
Kwang W. Jeon and James F. Danielli, ‘Micrurgical Studies with Large Free-Living
Amebas’, International Reviews of Cytology, 30 (1971): 49–89, quoted in Dawkins,
Extended Phenotype, 160.
22
Roman Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, in Style in
Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960),
350–377.
23
Christopher Bollas defines ‘normosis’ as the opposite of psychosis. In psychosis,
there is only the inner life; in normosis, the inner life has been evacuated.
The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (London: Free
Association Press, 1996), 135–156.
24
Yoko Ono, ‘This Is Not Here’, Eberson Museum, New York, 1971; see This Is
Not Here (np, 1999), directed by Takahiro Iimura. The phrase also appears in the
doorframe in the opening sequence of the video for John Lennon, ‘Imagine’ (Apple
Records, 1971).
25
See 350.org.
26
Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 32–54.
27
Charles Bernstein, ‘this poem intentionally left blank’, With Strings (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Permission granted by the author.
28
Martin Heidegger, ‘Being Dwelling Thinking’, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans-
lated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 141–160, 151–6.
Timothy Morton 17
29
Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes ( London and New York: Verso, 2008), 440.
30
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 5.
31
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981); The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoffrey
Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1987). See Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature, 47–54.
32
George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979); Douglas
Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books,
1999); Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied
Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1992).
33
Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form, 4.
34
See Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, 541–2.
35
Ibid., 75–8, 83–7, 406–7, 461–71, 483–8.
36
Martin Heidegger, ‘Language,’ Poetry, Language, Thought, 187–210, 209.
37
Jacques Derrida, ‘Hostipitality,’ Acts of Religion, edited, translated and introduced
by Gil Anidjar (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 356–420.