Reading Spacecraft 1: In what way is Morton’s prose like Shakespeare’s verse? [and why?]

Timothy Morton, Spacecraft, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

I posted a tweet about Morton’s new book, Spacecraft (not yet out), earlier today. Here’s the tweet along with Morton’s response:

wow!

— Timothy Morton (@the_eco_thought) August 10, 2021

Let’s begin at the end. In what way is Morton’s writing like Shakespeare’s? As you might imagine, I hesitated for a few seconds before actually releasing that tweet into the Twitterverse. Morton & Shakespeare? You’ve got to be kidding. No, I’m not. But you might not realize quite what I’ve got in mind. It’s not obvious, though I said it plain: “just beyond the edge.”

The thing is, Shakespeare is not a real person. No, I don’t mean that old “who is Shakespeare” nonsense. I mean that Shakespeare has long since ceased to be a mortal human being. He’s become a mythological creature.

The Bard. The Greatest Poet of the English language. The Greatest Writer that ever lived.

Are you kidding me? Those are titles, honorifics, laudatory epithets. They indicate, not the individual, who(m)ever they are, who wrote those plays. They designate a certain position in the cultural firmament of a large and miscellaneous group of mostly, but not entirely, Europeans and other Westerners. The North Star, that’s what this symbolic Shakespeare is.The North Star isn’t any better than any other star, nor any worse. But it happens to be in a convenient location for certain beings (us) to use it for certain purposes (getting around). So it is with Shakespeare.

Of course, getting back on track, that symbolic Shakespeare is a perfectly fine object, just like that real individual, and just like Tim Morton. Proper objects all. It’s their language that interests me.

Is Morton’s language as good is Shakespeare’s (pick whichever Shakespeare you will)? Likely not, though that’s beside the point – speaking of which, Morton has some interesting remarks on how he uses the ideas of prose and poetry in teaching (pp. 58-59). The point is that Shakespeare’s English is not quite our English. It’s just beyond the edge of our English. It’s a little strange, strange words whose meanings we cannot readily ken, so we read the footnotes (if we’re diligent, if not...).

And so Morton’s language is a little strange as well. Not so obviously strange as Shakespeare’s, none of those odd Shakespeare words you don’t recognize. But really, if you attend to it, strange. He talks OOO, object-oriented ontology. OOO is a kind of philosophy with which Morton is associated. I’ve blogged about it a bit, mostly several years ago (2012-2015, but referencing it here and there up to the present). In OOO everything is an object, that apple you just ate, the sun, the tsunami that wrecked Fukushima, the idea of the future, of atoms, of Mohammed, any and all ideas, Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen, the odor of myhrr, Denali (the mountain), and so on. You get the idea. So Morton spells that out with examples. Names some implications, e.g. withdrawal, with examples, and so on. That’s all quasi-technical philosopher’s speak. There are other books where he does more of that. But, in my experience, his writing is never so dense with philosopherspeak as that of, for example, Graham Harman. Which is not to criticize Harman, nor to praise Morton either. They are different. That’s all.

Just different.

Just.

Different.

Morton’s written a lot, and I’ve not read much of it, though I did read Hyperobjects quite carefully back in 2014. I don’t know how he’s been writing since then, but I have the impression in Spacecraft that he wants to minimize philosophyspeak, even eliminate it – not so he can address himself to a general audience, though he wishes to do that (and why not?), in favor of simply seeing and talking about the world in that OOO way.

That’s the sense in which Spacecraft is an operator’s manual for spaceship earth. I know, “operator’s manual” conjures up a book of instructions, perhaps several books, a thin one to get your started, and a thick one to bore you out of your mind once you’ve gotten going. Given that Morton has a long-standing interest in global climate catastrophe, you might think an operator’s manual for earth would say something about how to avoid it. Nope, nothing like that, at least not so far (I’m on page 68 of 112). He mentions global warming and the Anthropocene – how could he not? – but his focus is firmly on spacecraft.

And the Millennium Falcon is his primary example. There are various reasons for that, including the fact that he first saw it in a theater when he was nine (when I was nine I saw a light in the sky I interpreted as Sputnik). The thing about the Millennium Falcon is that it has no operator’s manual. Maybe it did when it first rolled out of the assembly building in that galaxy long ago and far away. But that event is not part of Star Wars canon, at least not yet. As far as we know, as far as we have seen, anyone who has managed to sit their ass down in the pilot’s seat of the Millennium Falcon also knows how to fly it, intuitively, either that or they can figure it out in real time.

That’s what Morton is up to in his style. A real-time reconfiguration of how we see and talk. A new language in which to pilot spaceship earth. Which is also and one and the same time a craft. And a craft is not a ship.

But that will have to wait for next time.