The World Is Not Enough: A Political Dark Ecology

Abstract

Timothy Morton’s dark ecology is positioned as an aesthetic and ethical study which is far removed from political theory. Although Morton touches upon actual political crises connected with global warming and on climate change skepticism and also deploys such fundamental concepts of political philosophy as territory, space, action and solidarity, he describes his approach as ontological rather than political. The author finds that dark ecology’s own foundations have been inherited from political theory. However, that does not make it inconsistent; on the contrary, under the right conditions it enables a different apprehension of both ecology and political philosophy. The author asks how politics would proceed in a world of uncertainty and proposes viewing Morton’s theory as a treatise on a political theory that addresses the problem of collective action. This is the main concept of any political philosophy out of which its description of the social order is constructed. Dark ecology denies any possibility of action by emphasizing uncertainty and the impossibility of predicting an action’s consequences, and this opens up new possibilities for conceptualizing action. It is precisely uncertainty that permits segregating action from the guilt that motivated Morton to divorce dark ecology from political philosophy. This is a narrative about the transformation of Morton the emancipator into a law-giver, about how political theory has evolved in parallel with the onset of the Anthropocene, about what will happen to the Leviathan in the age of global warming, and how to change the perception of the political from ontological categories to ethical ones.