Meditations in Midair

Abstract

There is a moment in nearly all Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons wherein the coyote, having been tricked into succumbing to his own more or less elaborate trap, runs off the edge of a cliff. Though he eventually plummets down with gusto, he fi rst runs out horizontally beyond the precipice and is briefl y suspended there, unaware of the sudden loss of ground. Only when he looks down, realizing that he has bid farewell to the support of terra fi rma, is he seized by the vertiginous verticality. But until he catches up to the abrupt change in his gravitational predicament, he is virtually suspended, held up by an imagined, transcendent ground mapped onto the gaping abyss. In a shortlived moment of the mind’s triumph over the weight of matter, Coyote continues to run midair, mechanically enacting what Graham Harman calls “a procedure no longer fl exibly adjusted to its surroundings.”1 Harman, whose objectoriented ontology (ooo) informs Timothy Morton’s work, argues that the kind of comedy that is cultivated in scenes like these rests precisely in “the way in which . . . transcendence and free decisionmaking power are undercut by . . . being delivered