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Summary Of Timothy Morton's 'Queer Ecology'

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Summary Of Timothy Morton's 'Queer Ecology'
It is a terrible yet bittersweet coincidence that I am writing a response to Timothy Morton’s “Queer Ecology” as my friends and family in the Philippines are being besieged by yet another tropical cyclone. Terrible because I feel guilty sitting cozily in front of my screen while halfway around the world hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who live in areas at risk of flash floods, landslides and storm surges are struggling to be evacuated as Ruby (the misleadingly sweet name the cyclone has been baptized with) maintains its Super Typhoon strength. Bittersweet because there is nothing like a natural disaster to make us humans reacquaint ourselves with our fragility and decenter us from our self-proclaimed status as the invincible rulers of this planet. This decentering also extends to aspiring academics like me who seek to thrive in a poststructuralist milieu; I again confront the realization that linguistic and textual discourses, no matter how brilliantly formulated, will not be able to impede or contain nature’s raw, material force. Morton also expounds on this ‘humiliation’, saying that humans are merely beings that exist in a ‘universe of autonomous processes’ (278). …show more content…
By making this sweeping yet amorphous claim, he is being organicistic himself, excluding the non-living / inorganic components of nature from making an impact in the ‘mesh’ he is theorizing. Even if Morton has extended desire to make it inclusive of other non-erotic, non-anthropocentric pleasures, it remains unclear to me where desire can be located in times of natural disasters, like when a storm surge swallows ones house whole. Do typhoons possess desire? If Morton says yes, then he will have greatly reconfigured queer theory to become very much akin to new materialism, where matter and its potentiality of always becoming (its ‘desire’ maybe?) get primacy over queering discursive
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