新美学·每日翻译 | 生态化 | 第一章（二）

Chapter 1（part 2 ）| Being Ecological | Timothy Morton

第一章（第2部分） | 生态化 | 蒂姆▪莫顿

翻译者：LONG Yunru

Normal for Some, Disaster for Others

一些是常态，另一些是灾难

This normalization is true—it happens, maybe it does have something to do with sleeping in a place. But is that really because things being handy, zuhanden, is the normal state of affairs? Object-oriented ontology is arguing that this ready-to-hand-ness of things is sitting on top of something much deeper and much stranger. There is a weird dislocation betweenreadiness to handand presence at hand. Stuff happens without us paying much attention (readiness to hand), yet the same stuff looks peculiar when it malfunctions (presence at hand). This is because things in themselves are ungraspable, totally and completely—irreducibly as they say. Things can't be accessed fully by anything, including themselves. You can flick a light switch, lick it, ignore it, think about it, melt it, fire its protons around a particle accelerator, write a poem about it, meditate upon it until you become Buddha. None of these will exhaust the reality of the switch. The switch could become sentient and develop the power of speech and go on a talk show. What it says on the show wouldn't be the switch—it would be switch autobiography."Well, I found myself in the fingers of this philosophy guy, he had jet lag, it was really weird ...I had a difficult birth.”

这种正常化是真的——它发生了，也许它确实与在一个地方睡觉有关。但这真的是因为方便吗，祖汉登，这是正常的情况吗？面向对象的本体论认为，事物的这种随时待用的特性正位于更深层、更陌生的事物之上。手的预备和存在之间存在着一种奇怪的错位，事情发生时我们没有过多关注（准备上手），但同样的事情出现故障时（在手中）就会看起来特别。这是因为事物本身是不可理解的，就像他们所说的那样，是完全不可简化的。任何东西都不能完全访问一个事物，包括它们自己。你可以轻弹一个灯光开关，舔它，忽略它，思考它，融化它，在粒子加速器周围发射它的质子，写一首关于它的诗，冥想它直到你成佛，这些都无法改变它是一个开关的事实。这个开关可以是有知觉的，发展演讲的能力甚至表演脱口秀。它在节目中说的不会是开关，而是开关的自传。“好吧，我发现自己被这个哲学家伙耍了，他有时差，真的很奇怪......我的出生很困难。"

And this is because things are mysterious, in a radical and irreducible way. Mysteriouscomes from the Greek muein, which means to close the lips. Things are unspeakable. And you discover this aspect of things, as if you could somehowfeel that un-feelability, in the beauty experience, or as Keats puts it, the feel of not to feel it.[6]This"and you may find yourself"tentative hesitant subjunctive quality isn't just a temporary blip and it certainly isn't just a phenomenon that only occurs to sentient beings, let alone conscious ones, let alone human ones. It's sort of everywhere, because being isn't presence.

事物是神秘的，以一种激进和不可简化的方式。“神秘”来自希腊穆因语，意思是关闭嘴唇。事物也是无法形容的，你发现了事物的这一方面，就好像你能在美的体验中感受到那种不可感性，或者就像济慈形容的，“不去感觉的感觉”。[6]“你可能会发现你自己”这个试探性的犹豫的虚拟语气不仅是一个暂时性的问题，不是只发生在有知觉的生物身上的现象，更不用说有意识的生物和人类。它无处不在，因为“存在不是在场”。

Kant showed that there's a difference between the real and reality.It's like the difference between a musical score—a bunch of dots and lines on a page—and the"realization"of that score by a musician and the audience who showed up to hear it. Reality is, if you like, the feeling that it's real: the music is what it is—this is a Bach violin sonata, not a piece of electronic dance music—but it doesn't really"exist"until you play it or listen to it. Kant suggests that this"realizer"is the"transcendental suject,"a rather abstract, universal being that's different from little me, but which seems to follow me around like an invisible balloon,"positing"things as large or small, fast or slow (it's a pretty boring balloon, only in charge of extension in time and space). Since Kant, a number of other candidates for the"realizer"have been suggested. Hegel argues that the"realizer"was what he calls"Spirit,"the grand march of Western human history. Marx argues that it's human economic relations: sure, there are potatoes, but they don't really exist until I've dug one up and turned it into French fries. Nietzsche asserts that it's"will to power”: things are real because you say they are, and you're holding a rifle, so I'm not going to argue.

康德证明了真实和现实之间的区别。这就像是乐谱——页面上的点和线和通过音乐家与听众“实现”乐谱的区别。如果你喜欢的话，现实是感觉它是真实的：音乐就是——这是一首巴赫小提琴奏鸣曲而不是一首电子舞曲，但直到你演奏或聆听它，它才真正“存在”。康德认为这个“实现者”是“先验的主体”，一个不同于“小我”的抽象、普遍的存在，但它似乎像一个看不见的气球一样跟随我，“定位”事物的大或小、快或慢（它只是一个无聊的气球，只负责时间和空间的扩展）。自康德以来，已有许多其他的“实现者”候选人被提出。黑格尔认为“实现者”就是他称之为的“精神”，是西方人类历史的伟大进军。马克思认为是人类的经济关系：当然，在我把土豆挖出来炸成薯条之前，土豆是不存在的。尼采断言这是“权力意志”：只要你这么说，事物就是真实的，你拿着枪，所以我不会争辩。

And Heidegger argues that it's a mysterious being called Dasein. The word is German for"being there,"and it's deliberately vague. Heidegger argues that more specific things (such as Kant's"subject"or the concept of a human or of"economic relations”) are"modes"of Dasein, a bit like musical key signatures. Ancient Mesopotamia is Dasein in the key of agricultural"civilization,"while the Aborigines are Dasein in the key of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Humans don't"have"Dasein, because Dasein producesorrealizesthe human, in the same way that our violinist realizes the Bach sonata. And while there's nothing to suggest that Dasein can't be exclusively human, this is exactly the assertion that Heidegger blunders into. Dasein isn't quite there, constantly— it's a flickering lamplight. But for Heidegger it's exclusively human, and German flickering lightis much more authentic than other kinds of flickering light. None of this makes sense. None of it makes sense on Heidegger's own terms. This is what OOO is arguing. De-Nazifying Heidegger doesn't mean ignoring him or bypassing him. De-Nazifying Heidegger actually means being more Heideggerian than Heidegger.

海德格尔认为，这是一个被称为Dasein的神秘存在，这是一个意为“此在”的德语词，一种刻意为之的含糊其辞。海德格尔认为更具体的事物（如康德的“主体”或人类和“经济关系”的概念）是此在的“模式”，有点像音乐的关键特征。古美索不达米亚是农业“文明”的关键的“此在”，而土著是旧石器时代狩猎采集者的关键的“此在”。人类不“拥有”此在，因为此在“产生”或“实现”人类，就像我们的小提琴家演奏巴赫奏鸣曲一样。虽然没有什么证据表明此在不能是人类独有的，但这正是海德格尔犯下的错误。此在不是一直在那里的、连续的，它是一盏闪烁的灯光。但对海德格尔来说它是人类独有的，德国的闪烁光比其他类型的闪烁光更真实，用海德格尔自己术语来说这些都没有道理。这就是面向对象的本体论（OOO）所争论的。将海德格尔去纳粹化并不意味着忽视他或绕过他，实际是意味着比海德格尔本人更具有海德格尔主义。

So if the truthfeelof beauty is telling you something true about anything at all—anything at all is called objectsin OOO, and these sorts of object are sharply different from objectified things, because they are radically mysterious—what truthfeel is telling you is that things are open. Also, the beauty experience is telling you that this thing, this thing I can see right here, is ungraspable. It's totally vivid, yet I can't get a grip on it ...I can't keep my hair on at all. It's like what an American car side mirror is telling you, out of the corner of your eye: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. Or it's like objects on a shelf by the artist Haim Steinbach.Things are intrinsically kinky, kooky, out of place—this out of place-ness isn't just a function of things breaking and malfunctioning and becoming vorhanden. What you experience in jet lag or inside a Haim Steinbach installation is precisely about exactly how things are.

因此，如果对美的“实感”向你表明任何东西的真实性，任何东西在面向对象的本体论中被称为“物体”，这些物体与客观事物有着明显的不同，因为它们是非常神秘的，“实感”告诉你事物是开放的。同时，对美的经验告诉你，我在这里看到的这件事是不可理解的，它非常生动，但我无法抓住它......我无法保持我的发型。这就像你眼角的美国汽车侧后视镜告诉你：镜子里的物体比它们看起来要离你更近，或是就像艺术家海姆▪斯坦巴赫（Haim Steinbach）放在架子上的物品。事物本质上是古怪、怪诞、不适当的，这种不适当不只是事物破碎或故障的表现，它还是现成的。你时差的经历或在海姆▪斯坦巴赫艺术装置中体验到的正是事情的本质。

What all this amounts to is that it's thenormalization of thingsthat is the distortion. A distortion of distortion. Being in a place, being in an era, for instance an era of mass extinction, is intrinsically uncanny. We haven't been paying much attention, and this lack of attention has been going on for about twelve thousand years, since the start of agriculture, which eventually required industrial processes to maintain themselves, hence fossil fuels, hence global warming, hence mass extinction.

所有这些都意味着扭曲是事物的常态，一个又一个的变形。在一个地方、一个时代，例如在一个大规模灭绝的时代，本质上是不可思议的。我们没有付诸太多关注，从农业开始以来这种关注的缺乏已经持续了大约一万两千年，农业最终需要工业过程来维持自身，于是化石燃料、全球变暖，最终导致大规模灭绝。

Love, Not Efficiency

爱，不是效率

Restructuring or destructuring this logistics of the world that has grown out of agriculture, which elsewhere I've called agrilogistics, is the one thing that would end global warming, but it is usually considered out of bounds, because it implies accepting a non-"modern"view.[7] Agrilogisticsmeans the logistics of the dominant mode of agriculture that started in Mesopotamia and other parts of the world (Africa, Asia, the Americas) around 10,000 BCE. Agrilogistics has an underlying logic to do with survival: Neolithic humans needed to survive (mild) global warming, and so they settled in fixed communities that became cities, in order to store grain and plan for the future. They began to draw distinctions between the human and the nonhuman realms—what fits inside the boundary, and what exists outside of it—that continue to this day. They also drew distinctions between themselves (the caste system). Very soon after the agrilogistical program began, all kinds of phenomena we associate with life in general showed up, in particular patriarchy and social stratification, various kinds of class systems. It's important to remember that these are constructs of history, the consequence of nomads and hunter- gatherers settling down and establishing cities based on a certain form of survival mode.

重组或解构这个由农业发展而来的世界物流，我在其他地方称之为“农业物流”，是一件可以结束全球变暖的事情，但它通常被认为是越界的，因为它意味着接受一种非“现代”的观点。[7] 农业物流是指大约公元前10000年始于美索不达米亚和世界其他地区（非洲、亚洲、美洲）的农业主导模式的物流。农业物流有一个与生存有关的基本逻辑：新石器时代的人类需要生存（温和的）全球变暖，因此他们定居在固定的社区，社区成为城市，以便储存粮食和规划未来。他们开始在人类和非人类领域之间划出适合边界恶区别，以及界限外存在的东西——这一直延续到今天，他们还划分了自己（种姓制度）。在农业物流项目开始后不久，我们与生活联系的各种现象出现了，特别是父权制和社会分层，以及各种各样的阶级制度。重要的是记住这些都是历史的建构，是游牧民族和狩猎采集者根据某种生存模式定居和建立城市的结果。

The modern view was established on (although it thinks itself as a further disenchantment of) now ancient and obviously violent monotheisms, which in turn find their origin in the privatization ofenchantmentin the Neolithic with its"civilization."

现代观念建立在现在古老而暴力的一神教基础上（尽管它认为自己是一种长远的醒悟），反过来却能在新石器时代以“文明”为核心的魅力私有化中找到它们的起源。

Ecological awareness is awareness of unintended consequences. Some ecological politics is about trying to light everything up in a totally nonflickery way, to make sure that there are no unintended consequences. But this is impossible, because things are intrinsically mysterious. So an ecological politics like that would be a monstrous situation, a"control society,"a useful term invented by philosopher Gilles Deleuze to describe our contemporary world. An ecological control society would make the current state of affairs, where kids get tested every five seconds for their ability to resemble a rather slow computation device, look like an anarchist picnic. Even more predictability, even more efficiency. If that's what the ecological society to come will look like, then I really don't want to live in it. And it wouldn't even really be ecological. It would just be this same world, version 9.0.

生态意识是对没有预料到的结果的意识。一些生态政治试图以完全不可能的方式照亮一切，以确保不会发生意想不到的后果。但这是不可能的，因为事情本质上是神秘的。所以这样的生态政治将会是可怕的情况——“控制社会”（control society），这是哲学家吉尔斯▪德勒兹（Gilles Deleuze）发明的用来描述我们当代世界的术语。一个生态控制社会将使当前的状况看起来像一场无政府主义野餐，在这种情况下，孩子们每五秒钟就要接受一次类似于一个相当缓慢的计算装置的能力测试，更具可预测性和效率。如果这就是即将到来的生态社会的样子，那我真的不想生活在其中。它甚至不会是真正生态的，而将是9.0版的相同的世界。

The ecological society to come, then, must be a bit haphazard, broken, lame, twisted, ironic, silly, sad. Yes, sad, in the sense meant by a character in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who: sad is happy for deep people.[8]Beauty is sad like that. Sadness means there's something you can't quite put your finger on. You can't quite grasp it. You have no idea who your boyfriend really is. This is not my beautiful wife. Which means in turn that beauty isn't graspable either, beauty as such—which means that beauty must be fringed with some kind of slight disgust, something that normative aesthetic theories are constantly trying to wipe off. There needs to be this ambiguous space between art and kitsch, beauty and disgust. A shifting world, a world of love, of philos. A world of seduction and repulsion rather than authority. Of truthinessrather than rigid true versus rigid false. Truth is just a 1000 dpi kind of truthiness. This isn't the same at all as saying everything is a lie. That's a statement that's trying not to be truthy, which is why it ends up contradicting itself. If everything is a lie, then the sentenceeverything is a lie must also be a lie ...and so on.

那么生态社会的到来一定是有点偶然、破碎、蹩脚、扭曲、讽刺、愚蠢、悲伤的。是的，悲伤，从某种意义上可以理解为英国科幻电视连续剧《神秘博士》中的一个角色所说：悲伤是深沉的人的快乐。[8] 美丽是悲伤的，悲伤意味着有些事情你无法完全理解，你不能完全抓住它，你不知道你男朋友到底是谁，这不是我美丽的妻子。这也就意味着美也是不可理解的，美必须被某种轻微的厌恶所包围，被规范的美学理论试图不断抹去的东西包围。艺术与庸俗、美丽与厌恶之间需要有一个模棱两可的空间，一个变化的、爱的、哲学的世界，一个充满诱惑和排斥而非权威的世界，感实没有绝对的真与假，真相是一种有着1000分辨率的感实，这和说一切都是谎言完全不同。这是一种试图不感实的说法，也是它最终自相矛盾的原因。如果一切都是谎言，那么这个句子“一切都是谎言”也是谎言......

Art That Talks about Its Substances

谈论其物质的艺术

So we aren't talking about a traditional concept of postmodernity here. In a way, postmodern art, and I'd put Talking Heads'"Once in a Lifetime"in that category, is in fact the beginning of ecological art, which is to say, art that includes its environment(s) in its very form. Of course, all art is ecological, just as all art talks in various ways about race, class, and gender, even when it's not doing so explicitly. But ecological art is more explicit. Postmodernism may not have known it consciously at the time, but the ambient openness and strange distortedness of many of its forms talk about the Earth out of which they are ultimately made. Something real is happening. Extreme postmodern thought argues that nothing exists because everything is a construct. This idea, now known as correlationism, has been popular in Western philosophy for about two centuries. We just encountered it in our exploration of different kinds of"realizer."Again, the idea is that things in themselves don't exist until they have been"realized,"rather like the way a conductor might"interpret"a piece of music or a producer might"realize"a screenplay in a movie.

所以我们这里不讨论后现代性的传统概念。从某种意义上说，后现代艺术实际上是生态艺术的开始，我会把“说话的头脑”、“一生一次”归入这一范畴，也就是说，艺术的形式包含了它的环境。当然，所有的艺术都是生态的，即使没有那么明确，就像所有艺术都以不同的方式谈论种族、阶级和性别。但生态艺术是更为明确的，后现代主义可能在当时没有意识到这一点，但是环境开放性和形式多变性都在指向着构成它们的地球。一些真实的事情正在发生。极端的后现代思想认为没有事物是存在的，一切都只是一种构想。这种思想现在被称为“相关论”，在西方哲学中流行了大约两个世纪。我们只是在研究不同类型的“实现者”时遇到了这个问题。同样，我们的想法是，在事物被“实现”之前，它们本身并不存在，就像指挥家“解读”一段音乐或制片人“实现”将电影剧本搬上荧幕一样。

But something funny has happened to this idea. For reality to be correlationist, there has to be a correlatee as well as a correlator: there is a violin sonata, not just a violinist. It's like two faders on a mixing desk. Over time, the correlator fader has been turned way up, while the correlatee fader has been turned all the way down. And this has given rise to the actually rather boring (and definitely anthropocentric) idea that the world is exactly how humans make it, with the correlatee turned all the way down, so down that it sounds like the correlator is doing a solo, not a duet.

但有趣的事情发生了。要使现实成为相关论者，必须有相关者和被相关者：例如不仅仅要有小提琴家，还必须有小提琴奏鸣曲。这就像是调音台上的两个音量控制器，随着时间推移，相关控制器被调高了，被相关控制器则被调低了。这就产生了一个相当无聊的（而且绝对是人类中心主义的）想法，即世界正是人类创造的，被相关者音量渐低，所以听起来像是相关者在独奏而不是二重奏。

The lineage of correlationism starts with Kant, as we saw, who stabilized the explosive idea that causality can't be directly seen, only statistically inferred, the idea with which David Hume blew up pre-modern theories of cause and effect. Kant stabilized the explosion by saying that although causality can't be seen to be running forward, it can be posited backward with 20–20 hindsightby the correlator. Again, for Kant the correlator is what he calls the transcendental subject, and since Kant a number of alternatives have been suggested, as I mentioned earlier: the spirit of history (Hegel), human economic relations (Marx), will to power (Nietzsche), libidinal processes (Freud), Dasein (Heidegger), to name a few.

相关论的继承始于康德，正如我们所见，他确定了一个爆炸性的观点：因果关系只能经统计推断得出，而无法直接观察。大卫▪休谟（David Hume）打破了前现代因果理论，康德通过说“虽然因果关系看不到向前发展，但是它可以被相关者用完美的事后分析”来确立。同时，对康德来说，相关者就是他所说的先验主体，正如我前面提到的，从康德以来，已经提出了其它许多选择：历史精神（黑格尔）、人类经济关系（马克思）、权力意志（尼采）、力比多（弗洛伊德）、此在（海德格）。

Correlationism is true: you can't grasp things in themselves, facts are different from data, and data is different from things. But that doesn't mean that what gets to decide what's real—the correlator, the decider—is more real than those things, whether the decider is the Kantian subject, Hegelian history, Marxist relations of human production, Nietzschean will to power, or Heidegger's flickering lamplightof Dasein. So while"traditional"postmodernism, informed by Kant, still relies on this correlationalism, what I'm talking about here, and what underlies OOO, is the idea that this very relationship may not be what we think it is. It may not exist at all.

相关论是正确的：你不能掌握事物本身，事实不同于数据，数据不同于事物。但这并不能决定什么是真实的，不能说相关者、决定者比其他事物更真实，无论这个决定者是康德的主体，黑格尔的历史，马克思主义的人类生产关系，尼采的权力意志，还是海德格尔此在的闪烁之光。因此，尽管康德所说的“传统”后现代主义仍然依赖于这种相关性，但我在这里所说的以及面向对象的本体论的基础是这种关系可能不是我们所认为的那样，它可能根本不存在。

注释：

[6] John Keats, “In Drear-Nighted December,” in The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (London: Penguin, 1987), line 21.

[7] Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

[8] Doctor Who, “Blink,” dir. Hettie MacDonald, written by Steven Moffat (BBC, 2007).