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 itting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reect 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, 395396) 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 benet 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): 117 Edinburgh University Press DOI: 10.3366/E0305149810000611 The Oxford Literary Review www.eupjournals.com/olr

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 ickering 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 denition of the linguistic sign: The value of just any term is accordingly determined by its environment; it is impossible to x even the value of the word signifying sun without rst considering its surroundings: in some languages it is not possible to say sit in the sun .1 Signs are interdependent. The existence of a sign implies coexistence with other signs. Semiotic interrelation cannot be a bounded structure. The textcontext 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 nd 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 rm 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

and what counts as non-metaphorical reality collapses when thinking engages text seriously. There is no ner example of textuality than Charles Darwins 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 uctuate before our eyes.3 As Darwin reads it, the Book of Nature transitions from work to text. Darwin and Derrida have such a close afnity: 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 elds.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 Derridas famous formulation Il n y a pas dhors-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. Derridas formulation that there is no outside-text is not a nominalism that claims that things only exist insofar as we designate

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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 innity: this continual operation is an algorithm. What remains is Cantor dust, a set of innity points and innity nopoints two innities; Georg Cantor got into trouble for discovering different kinds of innity 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 artice. 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 theyre 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 matterinformation boundary is permeable. Consider The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants,

Timothy Morton

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 algorithms unfolding? A ower 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 ower 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. Ones 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 elds. 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 benecial 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

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down, there is no rabbit, no rabbit avored DNA. And all the way up: rabbits act like rabbits, and thus pass on their genome. This is called satiscing, 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 oats 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 elses 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 reication 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 tting environments in nice organic ways. Yet there is no environment as such to t 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 ngers, or three. Anxious on behalf of teleology, Alfred Russel Wallace pressured Darwin to insert survival of the ttest into The Origin of Species.16 The hopelessly reactionary version that ttest means having six-pack abs is evidently false; nor does ttest 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

than that: there is no DNA avored 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 lifenon-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 t the Procrustean bed of organicism. Humans keep trying to distinguish rigorously between the living and the machinic. Countless sci- 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 mothers DNA possibly prevented her from spontaneously aborting you.18 Several levels of magnication above

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this, the host-parasite distinction has already broken down. Snail shell size may be a function of uke genes, since the shell is a phenotype that snails share with their uke parasites. Fluke genes will even inuence snails lacking uke 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 ukes, which in turn manipulate the ducks that feed on the shrimp.19 Just as textuality smears the textcontext boundary into aporia, if not oblivion, so the genomics version of ecological interrelatedness requires us to drop the organismenvironment 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 organismenvironment duality is potentially very benecial rst, 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 foregroundbackground 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

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 ickering, shimmering eld of forces without independent existence and in constant ux. 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 eld, for instance, life forms would be sizzled by solar winds: one good sign of extra-terrestrial life is planets with magnetic elds. 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, innite 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 Jakobsons terminology).22 The radical consequence of genomics is that materiality and information are not separate, or in Jakobsons terms, contact and message are one. Hard to distinguish then, between what is human and what is post the prex 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 rst 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 imsy 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

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experience, not ontology. This limitation curtails the bad circularity of phenomenological justications 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 denitively 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, oating alone on the page.27 Charles Bernsteins 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 Mallarm started in Un Coup de Ds: turning the page into a rubber sheet to stretch and compress. After him, all poems become Mallarm poems. It is as if, like Einstein, Mallarm discovered that space is curved: always warped, never really blank. Mallarm pointed out what was there all along; we only forgot to look.

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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. Aristotles 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 theres 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 Dont read me, Im irrelevant. Like the Cretan liar paradox (I am lying) it is both true and untrue simultaneously. The poems recursivity reinforces this, like Willard Van Orman Quines 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 isnt one. The poem seems strangely self-aware. Is it articially 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 couldnt 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

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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 Treks Dr. McCoy says, this is life, Jim, but not as we know it: a zek argues, Life 2.0 implies strange articial life, Life 2.0. As Slavoj Zi that life as such was already Life 1.0, articial 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 Bernsteins 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 rst word, this, points to itself. Realist stories often begin with the denite article: The studio . . . (Wildes 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 Dont 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. Signicance is already taking place. This is how ambient art explores the re-mark, a term in Derridas meditations on whether we can truly discriminate between writing and painting.31 Can we ensure that an array of squiggles is insignicant? What is the smallest indicator that we are in a zone of meaning? In the

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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 remark says, Hey! These things youre 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 innite regress potential here, since a minimal mark that ping s to echo the functionality of a system depends upon an already functioning system of meaning, an already inscribed surface. This risk of innite 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 gures as George Spencer-Brown, Douglas Hofstadter and Francisco Varela.32 Spencer-Browns Mark differs from Derridas contemporaneous remark.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-Browns 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 signication, 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 eld that is paradoxically already Marked: an innite regress. The systems-theoretical approach, embraced too swiftly by posthumanism, cannot account for the innite 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. Gdels Incompleteness Theorem is an account of why systems need to be inconsistent in order to be coherent; in a sense Gdels Theorem is deconstruction in mathematical form.

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This is indeed a profoundly ecological notion. Ultimately all life forms are subject to Gdelisation (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. Isnt 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 (Gdelisation), 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 Bernsteins un-poem. It is a pre-poetic poem, a piece of selfreferential 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 ping s 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers exemplary Trakl poem, this peal is the phatic ping, yet only in retrospect. We cannot tell whether Bernsteins 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: Derridas arrivant, opening a realm of the innitely other, an otherness that is intimately here, under our skin it is our skin,

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teeming with symbionts even as it evaporates here into an innite 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 surfacedepth manifold does not operate in this style of thinking. When life, when writing, has begun, we nd 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 Ancestors Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (London: Phoenix, 2005), 2667; 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): 603621. 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), 89136 (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, 1612. 9 There is not enough space here to do justice to Geoffrey Benningtons powerful exploration of this theme in the anonymously published Personal Growth, Oxford Literary Review 23 (2002), 13752, 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/.

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Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 156. Joan Roughgarden, Evolutions Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). See Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), chapter 2. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, introduced by James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Penguin, 2004). Dawkins, Extended Phenotype, 179180. Dawkins, The Ancestors Tale, 58194; Daniel Dennett, Darwins Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (London: Penguin, 1996), 157158. 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), 905909. Dawkins, Extended Phenotype, 200223, 226. Jacques Derrida, There Is No One Narcissism, Points: Interviews, 19741994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 196215. Kwang W. Jeon and James F. Danielli, Micrurgical Studies with Large Free-Living Amebas, International Reviews of Cytology, 30 (1971): 4989, quoted in Dawkins, Extended Phenotype, 160. Roman Jakobson, Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics, in Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), 350377. Christopher Bollas denes 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), 135156. 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). See 350.org. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3254. Charles Bernstein, this poem intentionally left blank, With Strings (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Permission granted by the author. Martin Heidegger, Being Dwelling Thinking, Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 141160, 1516.

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Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes ( London and New York: Verso, 2008), 440. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5. 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, 4754. George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979); Douglas Hofstadter, Gdel, 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). Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form, 4. See Hofstadter, Gdel, Escher, Bach, 5412. Ibid., 758, 837, 4067, 46171, 4838. Martin Heidegger, Language, Poetry, Language, Thought, 187210, 209. Jacques Derrida, Hostipitality, Acts of Religion, edited, translated and introduced by Gil Anidjar (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 356420.