Dark Ecology and the Curatorial Novel: Reading Anthropocene Temporality,

Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary Fiction

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MLitt in

Modernities in the School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow

Maria Sledmere
September 2017
Table of Contents

Introduction: Mysticism and Coexistence in the Anthropocene ..........................3

Chapter One: The Art of Dark Ecology ....................................................................8
Chapter Two: Time and Narrative, from the Contemporary to Recessional ......17
Chapter Three: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Curatorial Form ...........................27
Conclusion: Weird Realism for Virtual Futures ....................................................39
Bibliography ............................................................................................................42
List of Figures..........................................................................................................49
 Introduction: Mysticism and Coexistence in the Anthropocene

Mysticism today, a mysticism of the unhuman, would have to be […] climatological.

(Thacker 2011: 158-159)

The opening paragraphs of Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) and Tom McCarthy’s Satin
Island (2015) confront us with the oozing presence of the nonhuman. While
McCarthy’s narrator, U., describes human perception as a ‘shapeless plasma [which]
takes on form and resolution, like a fish approaching us through murky
waters’ (2015: 3), Lerner’s narrator, Ben, relates his recent ingestion of ‘baby
octopuses’ to a momentary experience of ‘alien intelligence, fe[eling] subject to a
succession of images, sensations, memories and affects that did not, properly
speaking, belong to me’ (2014: 3). Such sensory-rich imagery conveys an ethical
‘coexistentialism’ (Morton: 2010: 47): a figuring of experience spliced through the
affective apparatus of various subject positions; a speculative, synesthetic openness
towards objects and life-forms. Ben’s ‘taste’ of the octopus is conflated with the
‘touch’ of ‘salt […] rubbed into the suction cups’; like a cephalopod, he senses ‘an
ability to perceive polarised light’ (Lerner 2014: 3). This evocation of nonhuman
consciousness, what Ian Bogost (2012) terms alien phenomenology, indicates how
literary aesthetics enable metaphoric contact with other entities: when ‘ciphered’,
McCarthy’s ‘shapeless plasma’ of ‘things’ becomes form, begins ‘to coalesce into a
figure that’s discernible’ (2015: 3-4). In turn, this articulation of enmeshed ecological
consciousness reveals how a text may invite actual contact as affective entity in
itself, extending beyond the sphere of human reality.
Bruno Latour’s concept of ‘plasma’ describes a ‘background’ of ‘that which is
not yet formatted, not yet socialised, not yet engaged in metrological chains’,
something ‘in between and not made of social stuff […] simply unknown’ (2007: 244).
Latour’s plasma is an epistemological concept, a way of acknowledging the
distinctions between what is recognised and what remains mysterious, the way in
which we structure or define such objects and draw them into the ontological
foreground. This dissertation is concerned with such a space between epistemology
and ontology, where the unknown is inherent within being and identity itself. As such,
I take my philosophical cue from what Quentin Meillassoux calls ‘correlationism’: the
post-Kantian idealism that suggests things emerge into being insofar as the human
subject thinks or perceives them (2008: 5). This anthropocentric view of existence
nevertheless offers a way of questioning how interacting objects (when objects
encompass everything from icebergs to literature, coffee and humans) variously
access each other’s reality at different scales. Using Lerner and McCarthy’s most
recent novels as case studies, I ask: how might contemporary fiction make sense of
ecological coexistence within and beyond human experience? What ethical and
aesthetic questions are raised in the process?
Encounters between objects figure centrally in both novels. Their ecological
value lies in the way they illustrate the ontological and epistemological slippage
between things: the rendering of both contact and distance; from rationalist science
to negative capability in the face of our planet’s strange detritus. McCarthy describes
his own essays as jellyfish, ‘trailing strands in all directions, looking […] for points of
contact, large cluster-meshes to lace into, feed off’ (2017: 2), and this gelatinous,
accumulative and parasitic quality characterises the richly intertextual threads of
10:04 and Satin Island. Both are novels that sometimes withdraw into the ‘general
background’ of ambient poetics, but also transform time and reality with the
symbiotic ‘sting’ of their imagery, the undulating modulations of narrative repetition,
connection and digression (McCarthy 2017: 2).
We live in a time characterised by Big Data, a tentacular spread of sensory
media, embedded networks and archival devices. Such a mediated reality promises
access to totality, yet the further we reach epistemologically, the more things
withdraw their essence; we find ourselves de-centred, adrift in murky oceans of
knowledge. In the context of global warming, our increasingly exhaustive awareness
of nonhuman entities elicits both proximity and distance, as science reveals how
everyday events resound on geologic scales. As Timothy Morton puts it, ‘[t]otality
looms like a giant skyscraper shadow into the flimsiest thought about, say, today’s
weather’ (2010: 4-5). In recognising our symbiotic enmeshment with nonhuman
entities—from oil to microorganisms—we can no longer consider their ontic status as
Other to humans. Quotidian observations of climate are shot through with an
impending array of data, formations of statistical terror which further blur our sense
of ‘World’ as something external, ‘a background against which our actions become
significant’ (Morton 2010: 30). The pixelated mysticism of nonhuman ‘reality’
approaches perilously close in the Anthropocene. Despite its traditional association
with human-centred existence, the novel may sharpen our focus on ecologically
enmeshed experiences of time and reality, as well as exploring the ethical
implications involved in this process.
Whether defined as epoch or event, the Anthropocene encapsulates a
moment of convergence between human and geological history, approximately dated
from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and accelerating alongside
technological developments in the latter half of the twentieth century (Chakrabarty
2009: 207). Ever since humans began depositing carbon in the Earth’s crust,
geologic history has been overwritten by human inscription, the physical ‘traces’ that
humanity impresses in its relatively fleeting planetary existence (Szerszynski 2012:
169). Critically engaged ecological literature goes beyond merely thematising the
Anthropocene’s effects; it communicates in form how global processes at various
scales reconfigure ‘basic narrative operations’, transforming ‘the passivity of place’
into ‘an actor’ (Trexler 2015: 233). Like Sigmund Freud’s Mystic Writing Pad, the
Earth materially retains the indents of its traumas; ‘as we drill, mine and extract’, we
write ‘the stone book of nature’ (Szerszynski 2012: 180). The problem is, ‘nature’ in
the Anthropocene can no longer be understood in the Romantic sense of a place
elsewhere, a landscape placed on a pedestal for human admiration (Morton 2007:
5). Rather, a properly ecological thought interrogates such objectifying tactics,
favouring instead explicit acknowledgements of nature’s discursive construction, a
dark awareness of human/nonhuman intimacy and the shadows in which our
scientific knowledge falters.
This dissertation addresses how two novels by McCarthy and Lerner engage
both formally and thematically with what Morton (2010) calls the ecological thought.
These texts are read as case studies for thinking the Anthropocene through issues of
narrative, time, ethics and aesthetics. While existing criticism on the topic of climate
change fiction tends to focus on its thematic appearance in mostly speculative or
science-fiction genres (see Marshall 2015 and Trexler 2015), I discuss the
speculative qualities of these novels in reference to concerns within emergent
philosophy, anthropology and ecological theory. Throughout, Morton’s notion of dark
ecology guides my literary analysis, and Chapter One situates his work within the
emergent field of object-orientated ontology (OOO). I establish dark ecology’s
theoretical, ontological and aesthetic significance through readings of contemporary
visual art, poetry and music. I then demonstrate what the novel may do beyond
these forms, focusing on Morton’s concept of hyperobjects as a means of grasping
the material, cultural and existential conditions of the Anthropocene. Chapter Two
develops dark ecological concepts in relation to time and narrative, considering how
10:04 and Satin Island explore fraught questions of futurity alongside the present
and contemporary within the nonhuman scales of Anthropocene time. Finally,
Chapter Three examines the interplay of ethics and aesthetics in these novels, using
OOO to read strategies of mise-en-abyme, virtual poetics, the sublime and kitsch
alongside ecological notions of coexistence and feedback loops of causality.
As a case study in applying Morton’s dark ecology to contemporary fiction, the
scope of this dissertation is necessarily limited to two authors and two novels,
chosen for their relevance to recent debates on realism. By constantly engaging with
a plurality of aesthetic forms, Lerner and McCarthy push the novel’s interdisciplinary
boundaries while remaining faithful to the traditional materialism of ink and page.
McCarthy’s work with the International Necronautical Society (INS) structurally
blends reality with art, adopting avant-garde tactics such as the manifesto and
extending the field of theory to ‘real life’ interventions and art practises. The INS’s
prominent interest in matter has been discussed in relation to McCarthy’s previous
fiction, notably Remainder (2005) (see Nieland 2012), but little has been written on
its ecological significance, even though Satin Island’s thematic interest in oil seeps
explicitly into the burgeoning field of petro-criticism.
Often contextualised in relation to contemporary debates on ‘theory-fiction’,
Lerner’s semi-autobiographical blurring of fiction and reality is less a playfully
postmodern exposé of reality’s artifice and more a poetics of both irony and sincerity,
engaging with the individual and collective experience of the Anthropocene’s sensory
manifestations. Lerner considers the novel a ‘curatorial form’, a ‘genre that
assimilates and arranges and dramatises encounters with other genres’ (2013). The
metafictional elements of 10:04 and Satin Island can be read ecologically as self-
reflexively marking the novel’s material and cultural agency, in turn making virtual
gestures of art’s possibility in line with the Anthropocene’s paradoxically open-ended
and retroactive temporality. Instead of relying on a familiar apocalyptic narrative,
these novels negotiate the ethics and potentials of human action and knowledge
between writing and reality, present and future; remaining indeterminately open to
the conditions for an ecological democracy, while recognising its limits within
individual experience.
 Chapter One: The Art of Dark Ecology

With its melding of human and geological histories, the Anthropocene necessitates a
revised conception of the human, of various ontological distinctions and their
attendant ethics. As environmental disasters loom uncannily within our familiar,
domestic foreground, we are forced to think of ourselves as a species, with, as
Margaret Ronda puts it, shared ‘anthropogenic agency’; likewise, the ‘human race’
becomes ‘a nonhuman geophysical force’, as our physical actions resound on
planetary levels (2014: 103). Humanism’s conception of ‘coherent identity’, self-
determined action and intentional effect upon nature and artistic/literary form
(Abrams and Harpham 2015: 310) implies binary relations between author/product,
human/nature. Although the novel is conceptually and historically associated with
humanism, the question for contemporary fiction is how to explore such relations
from a dark ecological perspective, in which geological forces assimilate individuals
into equalising narratives of deep-time, where subjectivity becomes object within the
assemblage of collective species. Tied to this is an ethical problem: if existence is
now ‘collective’ (Chakrabarty 2012: 12), how do we attribute agency and move
forward towards a more ecological future?
One critique of the term Anthropocene is its equalising attribution of blame to
all humankind, when in fact global warming is caused predominantly by Western
capitalism and its systems of technology, colonialism and patriarchy. 1 Both Lerner
and McCarthy are white men from middle-class, Anglo-American backgrounds; it
would obviously be contentious to claim their fiction ‘speaks for’ humanity, let alone
the planet, at large. In their novels, however, humanism’s ‘authoritative’ subject-
positions are acknowledged in ways which interrogate the representative processes
of realist fiction itself. Chapter 2 of Satin Island begins: ‘Me? Call me U.’ (McCarthy
2015: 12), self-consciously recalling the opening line of the great American oil
narrative, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). U.’s statement elides divisions
between narrator/reader—U.’s very name hails us, the other you, into his subject
position. While Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), takes white
American self-consciousness to its neurotic extreme, 10:04’s narrator yearns to

1Numerous alternatives have been proposed, including Technocene, Chlutulucene,

Capitolocene. See Davis and Turpin 2015.
transfer his paralysing middle-class solipsism into ‘the possibility of a transpersonal
revolutionary subject’ (Lerner 2014: 47). This self-awareness proves crucial to each
novel’s environmental consciousness, as literary mediation becomes wedded to
materialised ethics.
10:04 and Satin Island create the possibility conditions for a future-orientated
literature that questions the present by committing to both literary indeterminacy and
thematic actuality. It’s this openness that makes the Anthropocene suitable as a
contextual term. While it permits less space for specific political critique, the
Anthropocene’s generalising quality lets us conceive of humanity not as ‘an ontically
given thing […] but as a hyperobject that is real yet inaccessible’ (Morton 2016: 25).
Rather than proposing the historic closure of apocalypse, the Anthropocene
establishes the possibility conditions for multiple futures and modes of coexistence.
The question, as Latour puts it, is ‘what politics anticipate the catastrophe sufficiently
so that these futures stay open’ (2015: 48). As a mobilising term with inbuilt moral
imperative, the Anthropocene transcends the myopic present-tense of capitalism and
projects towards ‘geological and biological futures’ (Davis and Turpin 2015: 9).
As these philosophical and geological debates accumulate, the term
‘hyperobject’ acquires significant weight. According to Morton, ‘hyperobjects’ are
‘things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans’; objects
whose qualities and scales vary significantly, but consist in that they ‘are “hyper” in
relation to some other entity’ (2013a: 1). The term usefully suggests how
Anthropocene effects are not accessible as totalities; even as we understand them
as such, we can only perceive them at local levels. As Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it,
‘[w]e experience specific effects of the crisis but not the whole phenomenon’ (2009:
221). We encounter the storm or oil spill, can technologically track its localised
progression, but never directly access the hyperobject of global warming as such
beyond a glimpse of its trans-human scale (Morton 2013a: 1).
If, as Lerner argues, ‘fiction is a technology for making contact with
reality’ (2015), then this contact only ever instates reality’s virtual appearance,
distributed and displaced by hyperobjects. In his treatise on virtual poetics, The
Hatred of Poetry (2016), Lerner notes the resonance of ‘virgule’ (the technical
indication of a poetic line break) with ‘virga’, a type of weather where ‘streaks of
water or ice particles […] evaporate before they reach the ground’ (2016: 100). For
OOO, physical reality is contained within the aesthetic dimension’s sensory mists,
revealing and concealing each object’s unique, core existence. Writing may
temporarily tune to hyperobjects like climate, but never fix their ontological totality. As
McCarthy puts it, weather is not just ‘medium’, but ‘also media’, disseminated across
discourse as both ‘index […] of truth’ and the ‘meaningless […] white noise’ of
intellectual aporia, a semantic pause or evaporation (2017: 8-10).
An aesthetic approach to ecological phenomena is built into Morton’s theory:
Hyperobjects (2013) includes many discussions of how art and literature may ‘tune’
into hyperobjects. Thinking ecologically comprises a relational dynamic, highlighting
our inextricable enmeshment within the aesthetic and causal dimension of agential
objects (Bennett 2010: 108). The term mesh is crucial, as dark ecological thinking
constitutes a recognition of interconnection at the level of identity, relation and
difference. By reading the différance of deconstruction through Charles Darwin’s
evolutionary theory, Morton notes how DNA embodies difference and deferral: every
life-form, like a Cantor set, contains the dialetheic paradox of both identity and non-
identity (2010: 55). Objects (from humans to rocks) are never fully self-present, but
rather strange strangers: the more we know about them, ‘the more we recognise our
connection with them and the stranger they become’ (Morton 2010: 17). The
ecological thought involves an awareness of strange strangers that manifests
ethically as unconditional openness to coexistence.
One cultural challenge posed by the Anthropocene is how to engage
aesthetically with enmeshed ontology. Lerner’s narrator figures the artist as spatially-
attuned, able to make ephemeral fictions of ‘possibility’ from the ‘bad forms of
collectivity’—the ‘trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, the vast
arterial network of traffic’ (2014: 108). David Maisel’s ‘The Lake Project’ (2017)
visually literalises this spatial attunement, providing a compelling visual engagement
with displaced and fractured identity in the wake of hyperobjects. His aerial
photographs of Owens Lake, California (Figure 1) flatten perceptual hierarchies onto
a textured plain, whose arterial trajectories collapse the viewer’s desire for a subject
position, as with OOO’s flattened ontology of objects. There is a sense, however, of
superimposition; that parallax of expanding space honing close to fleshly intimacy.
The landscape’s concentrated pollution recalls a ‘dynamic biological structure,
resembling (like Lerner’s ‘vast arterial network’) a mammalian matrix of blood and
veins (Gaston 2003: 41). Along with Maisel’s distorted scales, this focus on carnal
detail transcribes a document of ecological catastrophe into ‘a transcendent vision or
tone poem’ (Gaston 2003: 41). In this affective, enmeshed space, we experience the
vast yet intrusive scales in which hyperobjects such as chemical carcinogens impact
upon other objects, including our own contaminated biological strata. If ecology
entails a recognition that everything is connected, then this includes abjection, waste
and ruin; the ‘World’ can no longer triumph holistically over its sullied parts (Morton
2010: 35). Although we objectively ‘measure’ environmental pollution through
‘external mechanisms’, this alienates us further from understanding the nonhuman
‘experience of an entity’ (Bogost 2012: 63). As such, Maisel’s work captures the
resultant sense of a dark ecological sublime.
Within an object-orientated perspective, such experiences of the sublime are
caused by the object’s metaphysical withdrawal, our sense of what eludes. Morton’s
general rejection of holism aligns with Graham Harman’s critique of overmining, the
act of reducing objects to the sum of their parts, their relational actions with other
objects (Harman 2011: 64). This is where OOO differs from process or relational
philosophy; Morton’s mesh is distinct from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s
rhizome or Latour’s actor-network theory because where they focus on relationality,
the mesh recognises excess, the withdrawn being of objects in-themselves. Harman
posits a ‘philosophy of access’ whereby we only grasp reality in terms of ‘objects as
they manifest themselves to us’ (2010: 107). As Morton puts it, ‘all entities’ are ‘shy,
retiring octopuses that squirt out a dissembling ink as they withdraw into the
ontological shadows’ (2013a: 3-4). This amounts to the ‘aesthetic dimension’
becoming also the ‘causal dimension’: an object-orientated philosophy, literature or
art takes reality as appearance, the vicarious ‘causal traces’ of a thing’s ontic power
and recalcitrance (Morton 2013a: 90). My return to such octopoid metaphors
channels Bogost’s suggestion that metaphorism practises alien phenomenology,
conveying how ‘objects bask metaphorically in each others’ “notes”’—the properties
of appearance which lure us towards them but ultimately conceal their ontological
core (2012: 67).
This aesthetic dimension of enmeshed ontology can be traced in
contemporary poetry, examples of which exhibit the ambiguous play of dark
ecological awareness instead of didactic environmentalism. In Emily Berry’s poem,
‘Picnic’, we become aware of interobjectivity as a melding of process, appearance
and unspoken affect:

The mood of the sea is catching

Your eyes wear out from all the glitches
I sat there watching it and I can assure you it is so
Its colour became the colour of my eyes and the salt made me
cry oceans

(Berry 2016: 28).

The poem’s anthropomorphism displays indeterminacy. Is this the sea’s mood, or the
mood evoked by the sea in the human observer? Berry engages with mediation, as
‘glitches’ indicates some sort of screen or computational consciousness—a
mysterious system to go awry. The verb ‘catching’ implies an object, as in is catching
fire; yet Berry leaves the statement open, suggesting a viral sense of affect, a mood
that catches and spreads—but where? Moreover, ‘it is so’ lingers with
incompleteness: we can tie the sentence’s grammatical object to the sea, or else
turn the diminutive line-ending into a kind of noun, the dreamy declaration of being
that needs no elaboration—it is so…. The essence of presence, the mystery of ‘it’, is
preserved in the speaker’s coy aporia. With its varying line lengths, ‘Picnic’ materially
embodies a sense of the tide, not as regulated system or landscaped background
but as unique, contemplating force, mingling with the uncertain measure of human
thought. Berry renders coexistence, tenuously apparent through flickers of presence,
these syntactic ‘glitches’. The accidental features of the sea, ‘its colour’ and ‘salt’,
transfer onto the speaker, whose reaction (‘made me / cry oceans’) cyclically invokes
the ocean as originary source. This chiastic collapse of figure and ground persists
through the poem. The speaker draws backwards into the initiating scene of
utterance—‘[t]his is the rain, the October rain / I wrote that when it was still October /
It must have been raining’—as if to signify the gap between appearance and
essence; to materialise language in its coruscating overflow—‘language is crawling
all over me’—while remaining conscious of what escapes, the alien strangeness
(Berry 2016: 29-30).
 Berry invokes that ancient poetic trope of humankind’s thalassic
consciousness and emotional interdependence with oceanic landscapes, while
reflexively pondering each anthropomorphic limit, favouring the stark cry for identity:
‘[w]ho are you. Who are you. Who are you’ (2016: 30). The lack of question marks
implies the answer is not required; it is simply the statement, the confused ipseity
within negative capability, that matters. Berry’s poetic strategy recalls Jane Bennett’s
insistence on a vital materialist’s2 ‘capacity for naiveté’: a ‘sense of a strange and
incomplete commonality with the out-side’ which may prompt us to ‘treat nonhumans’
with more nuanced ecological care (2010: 17-18). The speaker’s briny tears,
scorched on the drying ground (Berry 2016: 30), affectively register the strange
reciprocation between objects. What ostensibly is a poem about human mourning
taps into the shadows of other life-forms, implicitly inviting a dark ecological reading
in its subtle emotional climate, its communion of human and nonhuman moods.
Of course, the invocation of nonhuman ‘moods’ is not without problems.
Imposing ‘human’ emotion upon objects risks reducing our perception of the
nonhuman to the familiar lens of human experience, unimaginatively reaffirming a
Romantic, anthropocentric reality. However, as Bennett argues, there is a place for
anthropomorphism within ecological writing; it allows us to ‘uncover a whole world of
resonances and resemblances—sounds and sights that echo and bounce’, so that
while initially we only see things ‘in our own image’, eventually the trans-objective
gesture of anthropomorphism reveals ‘isomorphisms’ between different materialities
(2010: 99). This active, sensory language—the ‘echo and bounce’—recalls how
Berry’s pared-down, affective primitivism comes to life as resonant materiality,
dissolving in the deeply human, and yet here inhumanly estranged aphasia of tears.
Writing a poem is an ethical and aesthetic act, a way of ‘know[ing] that I am feeling’,
a way to ‘appear to invite contact’ (Berry 2016: 29). Appearance here being that
flicker of causality, the slow unfolding of language as affective algorithm; that
‘ambient organicism’ that renders literature an ‘instrument’, however flawed, for
tuning to other life-forms (Morton 2007: 191).

2 Despite considerable distinctions between Bennett and Morton’s approaches, notably

regarding Bennett’s more relational ontology, for my limited purposes here I follow Bennett
(2012) herself in finding links between vital materialism and OOO to develop a more
comprehensive toolkit for politics and aesthetics.
 This instrumental quality is often more explicitly political in its engagement
with hyperobjects such as oil within existing discursive frameworks. Denise
Levertov’s ‘Mysterious Disappearance of May’s Past Perfect’ throws sardonic vitriol
on the capitalist register of contingency and risk regarding fuel extraction: ‘but this
impoverished grammar, nonetheless, / places in doubt an undeniable death’ (1993:
167). Like the oil reserves of the Earth, Levertov finds language ‘impoverished’; yet
scarcity itself is a mechanism for instituting ‘doubt’, for reminding us that our sense of
presence is dependent on culture, on language which delineates the point of ending.
Levertov’s labyrinthine array of ironically invoked conjunctives and hypotheticals
exposes the smokescreens of representation against the stark fact of the opening
scene: ‘the beaches blacken again with oil’ (1993: 167).
The speaker, however, does not occupy a position of ecocritical purity; rather,
she doubles back, hinting at her statement’s own hypocrisy in using the same
medium for rebuking those it seeks to critique. Invoking language as sound, she
admits how ‘might’ is a deliberate tuning to the ‘nuance of elegy’, ‘its minor /
homonym, so apt’ (Levertov 1993: 167). While Robert Smithson’s art-text piece
‘Heap of Language’ (1966), literalises the materiality of words, the ‘physical
presence’ of ‘printed matter’ (1996: 294 – Figure 2), Levertov exploits poetic timbre
to emphasise the affective force of words. We are reminded that language is a
medium between ourselves and the oil we spill; a medium not transparent but tainted
by its own materiality. If fear of the verb form ‘might’ is linked to our anxiety ‘that
causes do / produce effects?’ (Levertov 1993: 167), then it’s this conditional
possibility that marks the time of the Anthropocene. A realisation of intersecting
actions crystallised in our increasing attunement to material consequence: storms, oil
spills, poisoned waters.
While Levertov’s poem neatly condenses the language games of petro-
culture, from corporate propaganda to journalist sceptics, the issue of storytelling
requires more attention in relation to dark ecology. As Latour reminds us, ‘storytelling’
isn’t just a feature of human discourse, but also the sheer consequence of living in a
‘world’ that is intrinsically ‘articulated and active’ (2014: 13). Visual art is well-suited
to producing immediate physical effect, inviting viewers into what ‘reality’ might look
like at different scales and nonhuman perspectives. Music too can find ways of
‘tuning’ into various timescales, providing a virtual space for taking stock of our
embeddedness within nonhuman relations. One feature of hyperobjects is viscosity:
a force which ‘glues us to the hyperobject’ and confronts us with the knowledge that
‘we are oozing, suppurating with nonhuman beings’ at varying scales—from
‘mercury’ to ‘hydrocarbons’ (Morton 2013a: 197). The eerie sonic landscape of ‘Late
Anthropocene’ (2010), composed by Brian Eno, Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams,
follows the haunted trajectories of its base arpeggios, but any linear structure is
displaced by flourishing echoes and trembles. With various audible ‘layers’, the
song’s production evokes deep-time, with certain samples blossoming in voluminous
foreground only to trail away. The variant time-spaces at work in this piece (the
steadily undulating keys against looming planes of bass and fleeting shivers of ice-
like crackle), never quite synchronise but rather float murkily around one another,
indicating a rippling sense of presence and duration that eschews the expressive
authority of a ‘godlike’ composer. The occasional use of binaural beats distorts the
listener’s self-positioning, so that sound is truly surrounding, in the sense that it
cannot simply be placed. Morton suggests that ‘ambient poetics seeks to undermine
the normal distinction between background and foreground’ (2007: 38), and the
clustering aleatory of Eno’s sound, the distorted timbres of elusive instruments,
certainly performs such immersion with the strangely Other. Distortion, as aesthetic
practise, conceals the hyperobject’s essence.
With its toolkit of sound and rhythm, poetry too can ‘tune’ into the nonhuman,
reminding us that ‘space and time emanate from objects’ (Morton 2013b: 48). While
Levertov’s poem interrogates the ecopoetics of grammar, Berry’s dramatises
ambience and negative capability. Morton argues that within the Anthropocene,
intensified ecological awareness shifts our understanding of art: ‘we will come again
to think of art as a demonic force, carrying information from the beyond, that is, from
nonhuman entities such as global warming, wind, water, sunlight and
radiation’ (2013b: 22). Dark ecological art embodies the temporal flux of the now:
both retroactively from the future and looking to the future, tuning into agents which
disturb our narrowly human reality.
With its title directly engaging with ecological themes, ‘Late Anthropocene’
represents a feedback loop between culture and critique. Morton’s (2001) early
argument about ambient poetry as a device for environmental consciousness,
collapsing subject and object, references Eno’s liner notes from his 1978 Music for
Airports/Ambient 1 album. That Eno’s ambient work more recently ventures into
explicit ecological theory suggests the interdisciplinary project of dark ecology: a
discursive and curatorial openness that, as I will argue, may especially fit the novel.
Indeed, the novel appears from the neglected shadows of ecocriticism as a
form potentially well-suited to exploring the feedback loops of Anthropocene
temporality. The novel occupies a more expansive space-time than the poem or
artwork, framing playful grammatical tense within the temporal mechanics of
narrative at large. It allows, therefore, more scope for relaying the ‘disproportionate
scale effects’ of climate change—whereby ‘minuscule domestic choices […]
contribute to catastrophic effects’ (Trexler 2015: 26). While thematically engaged in
broad issues such as capitalism, technology and environmental disaster,10:04 and
Satin Island attend to the political, personal, ethical and aesthetic feedback loops in
which these issues resound within individual existence. By constantly probing the
role of the contemporary anthropologist or novelist, these texts exhibit less the
postmodern games of metafiction and are instead more akin to dark ecology’s noir-
driven irony, whereby the supposedly neutral narrator realises their implication in the
story or crime (Morton 2010: 16-17).
Dark ecological awareness means recognising our complicity, at various
levels, in the Anthropocene. I’ll now consider how 10:04 and Satin Island engage
both formally and thematically with time as it relates to objects, artworks and
narrative. Each novel considers how entities (including texts) exist as temporal
agents. While Satin Island explores the problem of the contemporary in the context
of ubiquitous data, 10:04 develops both individual and collective ways of thinking the
future as an open plurality of possibility. The concept of disaster—of disruptive
political or environmental event—allows each novelist to delve into ecological
questions of time, mediation and the impinging of hyperobjects upon individual and
collective existence.
 Chapter Two: Time and Narrative, from the Contemporary to Recessional

10:04’s epigraph, taken from Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community (1993),
describes ‘the world to come’: ‘[e]verything will be as it is now, just a little
different’ (Lerner 2014: 1). The Anthropocene provokes anxious awareness of
impending futurity; yet as an existential condition, it draws us away from an
apocalypse-to-come and towards a retroactive sense of ecological catastrophe as a
current manifestation of processes—something immanent to the contemporary
moment. Thinking ecologically in this apparently asynchronous context involves
perceiving different timescales: realising how damage manifests incrementally; how
in the context of geologic history the current period of ‘civilised mankind’ is but a
splinter of a second (Benjamin 1969: 263). Hyperobjects, from global warming to
plutonium, force us to confront the vertigo of divergence between these massive and
intricate timescales. The future must be understood not in the modern or Hegelian
sense of teleology towards human progress and freedom, but as an ‘uncertain and
unpredictable’, shared entanglement of human and nonhuman futures (Granjou and
Salazar 2016: 241-242).
Rich in digression, analepsis and self-reflection, time in 10:04 and Satin Island
lacks an exactly linear progression. Paratextual materials, intertextuality and
embedded narratives render increasingly elusive an experience of the unfolding
present as such. These narrative devices not only register the asynchronous time of
the Anthropocene, but also invite a virtual sense of narrative as an open play of
future possibility. I first address how these texts engage with the present and
contemporary, before considering how various events disrupt or charge this
pluralised experience of now.
If 10:04 and Satin Island constitute contemporary fiction, the term
contemporary needs elucidating in the context of ecological awareness.
Provocatively, Agamben figures the present as in fact ‘the most distant’ time; what
we think of as contemporariness ‘does not simply take place in chronological time’,
but rather ‘urges, presses, and transforms it’ (2009: 47). The contemporary is
marked by ‘untimeliness’: a distorting force that seeks the split in the present, the
point of ‘encounter between times and generations’; to consider oneself
contemporary, one must be ‘capable of transforming’ time and assembling its
‘relation with other times’ (Agamben 2009: 47,52). Accepting the Anthropocene
involves realising its accelerating crisis for humanity, whilst grasping our
insignificance relative to the time of hyperobjects and their planetary futurity.
In 10:04, the present is frequently met with an urgent sense of juncture
between past and future. As with Agamben’s broken backbone metaphor (2009: 47),
the time of Ben’s world is embodied: he has Marfan, a genetic disorder which means
there is a ‘chance the largest artery in [his] blood would rupture at any
moment’ (Lerner 2014: 5). This imminent threat of death intensifies the future’s
bearing on Ben’s present, and indeed the theme of extinction persists not just
personally but also in relation to species. The genetic glitch that instates Ben’s fragile
lifespan plays out against the narrative’s oscillating interest in the space between
human and geological time; the terminal time of his friend Alex’s mother’s cancer and
the time of dinosaurs. This elusive sense of material history is often framed as a
case of scientific progress retroactively estranging familiar objects, as when Ben
recalls how ‘the demotion of Pluto from planet to plutoid, retrospectively struck hard
at my […] remembered sense of both galactic space and geological time’ (Lerner
2014: 11). As Morton argues, the rising awareness of geological time within
modernity ‘is an abyss whose reality becomes increasingly uncanny’; the
strangeness of things intensifies the more we ‘probe’ them with scientific knowledge
(2012: 233).
Ben’s interaction with characters from multiple generations—from dying
elderly friends to Roberto, his eight-year-old tutee—indicate temporal fluctuations at
multiple scales. As someone born in the twenty-first century, Roberto’s intense
perception of imminent catastrophe reflects the contemporary’s existential condition,
whereby recent events coalesce into generalised disaster. As Eugene Thacker puts
it, with our ‘era’ of ecological pandemic, ‘we are continually invited to think about
humanity in relation to its real, hypothetical or speculative extinction’ (2011: 120).
With speculation in mind, it’s appropriate that this terror comes in the prophetic
hysteria of Roberto’s nightmare, as he relates it: ‘“the buildings all freeze up after
global warming makes an ice age and the prisons crack open too […] and Joseph
Kony comes after us”’ (Lerner 2014: 13). Here, disasters personal, geopolitical,
judicial and environmental collide in conjunctive simultaneity, marking the
asynchronous overlap of late-capitalism, terrorism and the Anthropocene.
Significantly, this conversation occurs while Roberto and Ben are assembling a
dinosaur diorama, so that the mixing of Mesozoic history with the moral and social
panics of the present evokes a fractured contemporary. Ben describes his reaction to
Roberto’s dream as a

vertiginous sensation like a transient but thorough agnosia in which the object
in my hand […] ceases to become a familiar tool and becomes an alien
artefact […] a condition brought on by the intuition of spatial and temporal
collapse or, paradoxically, an overwhelming sense of its sudden integration

(Lerner 2014: 13-14).

The dissociative ‘agnosia’ triggered by Roberto’s apocalyptic vision collapses the

temporal separations that narrative typically depends on. This untimely history
structurally reflects the contemporary’s Burroughsian cut-up, since neither Ben nor
Roberto have ‘the patience’ to match the dinosaurs to the correct geological period
(Lerner 2014: 12). In the distorted asynchrony of the moment, the ‘familiar tool’
ceases to be an instrument and becomes an ‘alien artefact’: withdrawn in its secret
essence, the way Martin Heidegger’s broken hammer ‘never offers direct revelation
of its own being, but exhibits this being only within the theatre of the as’ (Harman
2002: 69). The scissors previously existed as a tool, but now suggest the estranged
potential of withdrawn being. This object-orientated reading is ecologically poignant
because scissors have obvious symbolic resonance with cutting and juncture, with
Agamben’s sense of the contemporary (and therefore the Anthropocene) as a
cleaving of multiple times.
The metaphysics of disaster is also at work in Satin Island’s engagement with
the contemporary. While the momentum of Lerner’s narrative is sustained by Ben’s
obsession with fictional possibility—the on-going project of forging archives and
writing a novel—U. is committed to developing ‘Present-tense anthropology:
anthropology as way of life […] bathed in presence, and in nowness’ (McCarthy
2015: 72). The anthropologist’s traditional role is as detached participant or observer,
trying to avoid contaminating the field with their presence and later retreating to write
up findings. U.’s new ethnography would involve immersion in the present-tense: his
sense of the now as an experiential quality—‘nowness’—implies this fetish for
presence itself. But like bathwater, presence does not stick; there’s the implication of
fluidity. In Satin Island’s acknowledgements, McCarthy mentions Paul Rabinow, who
elsewhere argues that ‘[t]he contemporary is a moving ratio of modernity, moving
through the recent past and near future in a (nonlinear) space that gauges modernity
as an ethos already becoming historical’ (2008: 2). As ‘ethos’, modernity shifts from
epoch to affective climate, gauged by a surrounding sense of relation that disregards
linear time in favour of space. U.’s notion of inhabiting the present is thus significant
because it envisions the spatial dynamics of a contemporary anthropology, taking its
cues from actual physical surroundings—the detritus of a ‘way of life’.
It turns out, however, that U.’s Present-tense anthropology is less focused on
life than on disaster and death. Very little occurs in the actual diegetic world of U.’s
present, excepting the death of his friend Petr. What absorbs more narrative time are
meditations on comparatively grandiose events, ecological (oil spills) or otherwise
(the suspicious death of a parachutist). In 10:04, death connects the spatial and
temporal, recalling the INS declaration that ‘death is a type of space, which we
intend to map’ (McCarthy and Critchley 2012: 53). This cartographic skimming of
endings and origins is reproduced in Satin Island’s form, where paragraphs are
numbered as in a report or corporate document. This structure echoes the televisual
micro-narratives of J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which tap into
psychological discourse as opposed to Satin Island’s anthropological glosses. While
Ballard’s overloaded collage of micro-narratives and screen-bites narcotically
desensitise the reader, McCarthy’s compressed paragraphs paradoxically open a
space for contemplation. Not bound to the flow of linear time, they enable attention to
specific intellectual or political issues, creating an accumulative sense of associative
significance as the narrative progresses. While condensed, the fragments extend the
contemplative space of the interval which separates them: we ‘find in this gap not
what ends them, but what prolongs them’ (Blanchot 1995: 58). The hardback
version’s inner jacket features a paratextual assemblage of yellow post-its, inviting
us to consider each paragraph as one of U.’s loose notes, arranged from the
overflow of his dossiers. While Ballard’s narrative wallows in the disorderly
postmodern spectacle, U. offers a sincere, albeit flawed attempt to structure the
chaos of twenty-first century reality—from the ecological disaster of its central oil spill
to the mysteries of bureaucracy.
 Although numbering suggests linearity, progression and order, U.’s discursive
trajectories follow a meandering route, littered with conditionals (‘[w]hat if…?’) and
the gestural aporia of the unfinished proposition (‘[a]nd yet…And yet…’) (McCarthy
2015: 72-73). The numbering interrupts classical realism’s temporal ‘flow’, constantly
drawing attention to textuality’s arbitrary topographies of time. Sitting down to write,
U. envisions himself in spatial terms, as if setting out to map and conquer ‘pure and
abstract space’ (McCarthy 2015: 89). Like the ‘endless metamorphosis’ of undulating
taffy U. recalls from childhood (McCarthy 2015: 36), there’s a sense in Satin Island
that being and time rove in materialised repetitions, stretches, loops.
The affective condition of U.’s sprawling and collapsing discourse might be
deemed anxiety, a condition implicitly steeped in ecological awareness. As Morton
puts it, ‘anxiety is how I experience myself as a thing’; stuck in a loop, ‘an entity
among others’ (2016: 78). Anxiety is the elemental realisation, for Morton, that what
we daily abject ends up somewhere rather than nowhere (2016: 78). U.’s apophenic
obsession with arbitrarily connecting disparate news phenomena enacts a clustering
contemporary, whereby no aspect of existence is insignificant or forgotten. His
anxious attempt to find a form for the Great Report is punctuated by reference to the
writing scene itself (Weaver 2016: 115). This is a technique found in McCarthy’s
essays too, as in ‘Recessional, or the Time of the Hammer’: ‘[a]s I wrote this essay, I
kept hearing a tune playing in my head […] over and over again’ (2017: 109). These
moments of diegetic pause emphasise the feedback loops between writer and
reader, but also trap us in a sense of the contingent, the virtual: the corporate
semiotics of U.’s dossiers don’t close down narrative but rather spill out the
contemporary’s fractured uncertainty.
At first, U. envisions his project as imperial and Enlightenment ‘towers and
palaces’, but it soon becomes an ‘inscrutable’ ‘black box’ (McCarthy 2015: 75-75)—a
processing machine that operates without human comprehension. Running on
secret, internal loops, the black box becomes present-at-hand only when it stalls,
buffers. Satin Island is consumed with buffering: U. declares with chiastic exaltation,
‘[e]verything becomes buffering, and buffering becomes everything’ (McCarthy 2015:
69). When Madison relates her story about being captured during a protest and
forced to re-enact various gestures, U. frequently interrupts or ‘buffers’ this nested
narrative to focus on the narrative ‘present’, marking the passing afternoon by
mediating reference to the restaurant environs. As the penultimate ‘event’ in Satin
Island, what matters about Madison’s story is less the content than the
procrastinating rhythms of its telling. Her captor’s broken ‘gizmo’ spills ‘a kind of
sonic dribble’ (McCarthy 2015: 156). Noise constitutes ‘a confusion of figure and field
[…] like garbage, it has no meaning’, but simultaneously ‘signifies an excess of
signification; meaning become so dense and continuous that it transforms into
field’ (Robertson 2012: 63). What Eno achieves with coalescing planes of ambient
sound, Satin Island stages in fiction. As affect materialises into noise, rid of
anthropocentric signification (the Enlightenment promise of imparted knowledge) it
becomes residue matter in both Madison’s tale and McCarthy’s novel. As Madison
recounts, ‘all the objects in the room just sat there, doing nothing, for a long, long
time’ (McCarthy 2015: 156). This inertia of unidentified forms conjoins ethics with
ontology. In the negative space of these static entities, a specifically weird3 sense of
enmeshed intimacy and even empathy occurs between Madison and her captor.
Whatever psychic traumas underlie his actions, the narrative does not explore them;
rather, there’s simply the cathartic sense of a shared, compressed present, mediated
by layered narratives.
Crucially, the ecological thought entails a recognition of time as an emanation
of objects, including the novel itself as temporal technics. In 10:04, the occurrence of
storms prompts reflection on the ways in which hyperobjects institute temporal
suspension as they transiently manifest with localised intensity. Hiding out with Alex
and waiting for the storm’s arrival, Ben finds himself breaking the physical
boundaries of their friendship (Lerner 2014: 21). With the storm’s threat dissolved the
following day, Ben considers this event as ‘retrospectively erased’; where before the
storm had opened a new ‘sociability’ with others, these ‘moments’, ‘enabled by a
future that had never arrived’, were forgotten in the future that had arrived (Lerner
2014: 24). The virtual intimacy with Alex is quickly supplanted by a narrative jump-cut
to a post-coital scene with Ben’s actual lover, Alena. The jarring effect of this spatio-
temporal leap reminds us that the present is an effect of narrative, subject to

3 I use the term ‘weird’ in Morton’s sense, borrowing from its Norse meaning as ‘twisting
fate’, connoting the ‘twisted, looping form’ of ecological awareness (2016: 6).
multiplicities. 4 Our sense of settlement within space-time is displaced with
simultaneity; the here and now is shot through with there. These subtle narrative
tactics gesture towards a general openness regarding presence in the context of
hyperobjects, a surrendering of the object (here, the narrator) to the open
possibilities of fictional time. Referencing the famed moment of time travel in Robert
Zemecki’s Back to the Future (1985), 10:04’s very title inscribes this sense of
narrative as technics of time, converting ‘the untensed relations of events back into
the tensed sequence of human experience’ (Currie 2009: 365).
In 10:04, the notion of fictional time as multiply branching virtual possibility is
pointedly registered when Ben visits an exhibition of Christian Marclay’s The Clock.
Staging a series of synchronised timepieces across many screens of different media,
Marclay’s exhibit comprises a collage of time as fictional technics, a collage which
doesn’t govern linear narrative but rather encourages the viewer to arrange the
fragments from its visual bricolage: ‘[a]s I made and unmade a variety of overlapping
narratives out of its found footage, I felt […] more possibility than determinism, the
utopian glimmer of fiction’ (Lerner 2014: 54). Here, Ben repeats the epigraph’s
phrase, this time with italics: ‘[e]verything will be as it is now […] just a little
different’ (Lerner 2014: 54). The exchange between paratext and diegetic space
collapses the distinction between text/reality and posits narrative as ontological
agent with utopian potential. As Bogost reminds us, ‘language itself is composed of
things. Words do not just denote, they also operate’ (2012: 56). The italicised
emphasis suggests incantation, a performative function; the insistence of an
imminent now within the present. This phrase is repeated and modulated throughout
the novel, as with the phrase ‘unseasonably warm’ (Lerner 2014: 32)—repeated no
less than seven times in 10:04’s narrative. Such repetitions accumulate a feeling of
déjà vu; of time, mediated through meteorological awareness, out of joint.
What fiction can do beyond art and poetry, then, is instate futurity in its very
narrative. The proleptic implications of metafictional self-consciousness, Mark Currie
argues, encourage ‘an experience of the present as the object of a future

4 Significantly, these scenes occur opposite a reproduction of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus,
captioned with Walter Benjamin’s assessment of the Angel of History as ‘propel[led]’ by the
‘storm’ into the future while turned to the past (Lerner 2014: 25). Once again, narrative is
figured in meteorological terms; a billowing sense of indeterminate direction captures the
ecological reverberations between art, writing and time.
memory’ (2007: 45). In Satin Island, U. describes with great rapture a hypothetical
presentation, the one he ‘should have given’ (McCarthy 2015: 102). This fantasy
presentation dominates greater narrative space than U.’s relaying of the actual
conference. The space given to virtual futures in each text recalls again the
recessional time of Levertov’s ‘might’, the impossibility of a metaphysics of presence
in the age of hyperobjects. As Morton puts it, ‘[a] good translation of the
Anthropocene is There is no outside-human text’ (2012: 231); there is a complete
enmeshment of human/nonhuman realities and times.
The world of 10:04 and Satin Island may be woven by the continuous thread
of human consciousness, but this thread is caught up in knots of nonhuman
temporality, as digressional narratives (pulled to multiplicity by various domestic,
professional or environmental events) disrupt the seamless order of classical
realism. Narrative’s ‘model of time’, Currie argues, transgresses ‘the boundary
between actual and potential futures to produce a hermeneutic circle between
narrative and time’, prompting our sense of the future as a ‘model of teleological
retrospect’ (2007: 21). This recalls dark ecology’s feedback loops, the semiotic
refractions of matter and affect, here inscribed literally in 10:04’s plot. Ben intends to
pay for the future (Alex’s baby) by forging a virtual past (a novel comprised of fake
email archives): ‘“[f]alsifying his archive to subsidise fertility treatments; faking the
past to fund the future”’ (Lerner 2014: 123). Boiling Ben’s plans down to alliterative
sloganeering, this statement captures the visionary possibility immanent to Ben’s
plans; the equation of fraudulence and capital marked by syntactical parallelism.
Time equals possibility, and possibility is forged in the materialised marketplace of
fiction.
Since the Anthropocene is both of and from the future, fictional narrative may
inculcate the virtual potentials of agency while also recalling the dangers that await
us. While Morton (2012) argues that ecology needs to think without the present,
Pieter Vermeulen (2016) retains an ecology of the present in his reading of 10:04’s
transpersonal biopolitics. Just as Satin Island is premised on U. writing the Great
Report, 10:04 follows its narrator’s on-going projects in poetry and prose. Such
metafictional elements, however, do not simply recreate the postmodern Mobius strip
of reality/fiction—an endlessly recursive ontology of now. High postmodern theory
describes an age of flattened present, whether Fredric Jameson’s ‘loss of
historicity’ (1991: ix) or David Harvey’s description of time-space compression as
resulting in an ‘overwhelming present’ (1992: 291). In 10:04, however, the play
between virtual and real serves ‘to assert the irreducible actuality of the reality that
the novel describes’ (Vermeulen 2016: 9).
In ‘The Golden Vanity’, 10:04’s embedded and autobiographical short story,
global warming as hyperobject looms in and out of focus. Wandering among ‘the
confusion of seasons’, the protagonist experiences weird weather: ‘[t]he unusual
heat felt summery, but the light was distinctly autumnal’; this recalls ‘a doubly
exposed photograph or matting effect in film: two temporalities collapsed into a
single image’ (Lerner 2014: 63). The superimposed duplicity of this temporality, two
times shimmering in the place of the present, indicates the disorientating, sensory
impact of hyperobjects. Simultaneously, the fact that this passage occurs as fiction-
within-fiction, echoing within itself themes of extreme or unseasonable weather at
play throughout 10:04’s main narrative, structurally recreates that blurring effect of
overlapping temporalities and indeed presence. In fiction, the events of Ben/Lerner’s
lives are reduplicated, rendered uncanny in the context of a virtual space
contaminated by a plural chronology of possibility.
What Morton and Vermeulen share is a sense of the Anthropocene’s present
as unfixed, an ontological flicker between temporalities both human and nonhuman.
Historical events, from the earliest carbon deposit to yesterday’s oil spill, accumulate
resonance in the lived reality of the Anthropocene; the contemporary becomes the
liminal unhinging of past and future. As 10:04 closes in the wake of another
hurricane, Lerner evokes the approaching velocity of hyperobjects, despite their
dispersed nonlocality. While the storm hits other areas, for he and Alex ‘[a]nother
historic storm had failed to arrive, as though we […] were falling out of time’ (Lerner
2014: 230). This provides a glimpse into the Anthropocene’s abyss of displaced
presence. In 10:04 and Satin Island, the present and contemporary are caught in the
existential alienation that occurs when registering the significance of human
subjectivity against the imposition of hyperobjects.
While ecological art and poetry can register with synesthetic intensity ‘the
sensory experience of an increasingly unpredictable world’ (Davis and Turpin 2015:
11), the novel, with its technics of narrative, is particularly adept at representing the
temporal challenges posed by the fusing of human and geologic history. This entails
recognising the rippling resonance of disaster across objects and their affects, but
also a critical reflection on writing as an ethical technology for interrogating time itself
as experiential construction. Since this experience often involves both uncanny
recognition and sublime alienation, the ricocheting intimacies that transcend familiar
bounds of scale, my final chapter will explore how aesthetics and ethics play out in
these texts. Building on prior analysis of metafictional devices and virtuality, I
consider the chiasmic impulse of literature and theory, manifested in Lerner and
McCarthy’s rendering of medial aesthetics, realism and coexistence.
 Chapter Three: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Curatorial Form

“Art has to have something to offer other than stylised despair.”

(Lerner 2014: 93)

As both philosophy and mode of literary analysis, OOO is intimately tied to questions
of aesthetics. Writers such as Harman and Morton are often critiqued for their poetic
style, interwoven with anecdote, lyric digression and the notorious ‘Latour litany’: a
catalogue of ‘disparate things’ gathered ‘like a strong gravitational field’ (Bogost
2012: 49).5 Andrew Cole dismisses Harman’s litany-filled discourse as mired in ‘the
languages of mysticism and idealism’, resulting in a form of mimicry whereby the
philosopher stands as a spokesperson for objects (2013: 112,107). What Cole views
as rhetorical posturing, I consider an aesthetic attempt to ‘tune’ into objects rather
than mime their elusive essence. Examples include Morton’s octopus metaphor
(2013a: 3-4), or Harman’s evocation of objects as metaphysical black holes, whose
accidental features or ‘notes’ radiate with ‘tantalising hints’ of the object’s
‘core’ (2005: 185). Such ontographical ‘inscriptive strateg[ies]’ reveal the abundance
of entities and their enmeshed coexistence, without reverting to anthropocentrism’s
classifying impulse (Bogost 2012: 38). OOO’s understanding of ontology—and by
extension ecological ethics—is thus consciously translated through literary
aesthetics.
The Anthropocene is not just a theoretical idea but above all a physical
experience, ‘so built in to our sense that it determines our perceptions’ and hence ‘is
aesthetic’ (Mirzoeff 2014: 220). I now consider how the poetics of 10:04 and Satin
Island attune humankind to (hyper)objects. The question of our philosophical
‘access’ to nonhuman reality is tied to literary realism. While climate change thus far
has ‘stubbornly resisted’ conventional realism (Trexler 2015: 223), in these novels
realism as literary effect is interrogated and exploited as a means of registering
fiction’s possibility as an ethical and aesthetic ecological mode, within the reciprocal
spheres of culture and politics.

5We might, for instance, condense Satin Island to oil, airspace, anthropologist, shroud,
dossier, data; such a ‘jumble’ evokes intimacy with objects while non-anthropocentrically
addressing their unique and inaccessible ontological ‘shadow’ (Morton 2011: 174-175).
 As a curatorial novel,10:04 explores how the art object relates to
Anthropocene themes of deep-time, futurity and coexistence as they occur within
material contexts. The artistic practise of Alena, Ben’s intermittent lover, recreates
the Anthropocene’s paradox of retroactive futurity: a sense of hyperobjects coming in
and out of phase with human existence. By distressing her art, Alena accelerates the
aging process to varying effect of temporal impression. While her grazed ‘Abstract
Expressionist imitations’ remain ‘compellingly unchanged’, other works appear as if
‘defrosted from a future ice age’ (Lerner 2014: 27). Objects, therefore, embody tense
and time. Art may render this explicitly, confronting us with the fact that we access
temporality through matter, by seeing its effect on skin, stone or paint.
Ben is most impressed by Alena’s ‘Institute for Totalled Art’, featuring work
which has incurred some damage and is thus legally declared devoid of value
(Lerner 2014: 131). What strikes Ben about this exhibition is its contemporary
political implications. This is not Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymade’, the aesthetic
commodification of an everyday object, but rather the liberation of objects from their
‘monetisable signature’ (Lerner 2014: 133). The passages around this scene
resemble art critique, as Ben declares the totalled art as ‘exorcised […] of the
fetishism of the market’, ‘a utopian readymade—an object for or from a future where
there was some other regime of value than the tyranny of price’ (Lerner 2014: 134).
This veering between for and from indicates the recessional dynamics of
Anthropocene futurity. Here aesthetics offer utopian possibility, a rare glimpse of
what art might look like outside of capitalist logic, the ‘tyranny of price’.
As artwork itself, the novel’s engagement with ambience serves to anchor
momentary experiences of presence. Ben’s flaneurial evocations of New York’s
architecture evince that Romantic, ekphrastic gesture of imbuing environment with
medial presence. He imagines himself ‘beneath the Brooklyn Bridge’s Aeolian
cables’, noting how the evening ‘felt like magic power, when light appears immanent
to the lit’ (Lerner 2014: 135,134). Art, as Tom Sparrow argues, disrupts our
‘intentional’ handle on the world’, offering instead ‘the free play of our
imagination’ (2013: 26). The city becomes an enchanted grid of twanging
instruments and affects to be ‘played’ but not hubristically analysed and discerned.
We glimpse the sublime ‘light’ of nonhuman reality but must separate immanence
from its fragile appearance.
 There’s a sense, therefore, that the ‘presence’ evoked in Ben’s narrative is
always permeated by the virtual, the not-there. Lerner literalises this in a poem Ben
writes on residency in Marfa:

[…] it’s precisely 

where the hand ceases to signify a hand
and is paint, no longer appears to be warm 
or capable, that it reaches the material 
present, becomes realer than sculpture because
tentative

(Lerner 2014: 176).

It is ‘tentative’ possibility, the virtuality of the signified hand, that is ‘realer’—the suffix
implying that reality itself is a fluid continuum. The accumulative clauses dramatise
the object’s emergent presence. The hand is stripped of its human properties, its
mammalian warmth and use-value, and becomes materially present-at-hand in the
Heideggerian sense of handiness as ‘the ontological categorial definition of beings
as they are “in themselves”’ (Heidegger 2010: 71), as opposed to beings for
something. In poetry, Ben rewrites the ontological transformation of the dinosaur
scissors, the totalled art—objects freed from utility. Rather than simply fictionalising
this withdrawn reality, making himself vulnerable to charges of panpsychism or
obscurity,6 Lerner uses mise-en-abyme to preserve the virtual encounter with the
creative object—an aesthetic ‘tuning’ whose ethics comprise a non-anthropocentric
attention to material coexistence.
In Satin Island, the question of aesthetics is central to both U.’s Great Report
and McCarthy’s poetics. What McCarthy says of Gerard Richter’s paintings is true of
his own novel: his prose foregrounds ‘the fact of mediation’, ‘overwrit[ing] our
perceptual relation to the world by rerouting it through its glitch-ridden mediating
screens’ (2017: 129). This mediation is explicitly material; the aesthetic imperative of
the INS is ‘to let matter, matter, to let form touch absence, ellipsis, and
debris’ (McCarthy and Critchley 2012: 225). While U.’s boss, Peyman, condenses
objects in Latourian manner to ‘[b]undles of relations’ (McCarthy 2015: 40),

6 A criticism often launched at OOO. See Brown 2013.

McCarthy’s poetics hone in more on objects and their excesses—the withdrawn
being which evades literary mediation in its elliptical glitching.
Writing may, however, enact performative contact with hyperobjects as they
phase in and out of human perception, often in relation to catastrophic events such
as oil spills. Andy Hageman (2016) usefully highlights Satin Island’s petro-cultural
significance, but since Hageman reduces the novel’s ecological politics to notions of
infrastructure, more attention is needed regarding its material ecopoetics. U. is
obsessed with the interplay between oil/landscape, ink/paper; a chiasmus which
emphasises the material basis of writing’s oozing viscosity. Viscosity is ‘a feature of
the way in which time emanates from objects’ (Morton 2013a: 33), the experiential
realisation that distance is also intimacy: toxic emissions from miles away clot in our
lungs, the ‘poisoned’ seas infect restaurant sushi (Lerner 2014: 240). The
environmentalist ideology of returning to ‘Nature’ collapses as hyperobjects force us
to realise that nature, in its uglier forms, is already within us (Morton 2013a: 28). The
end of Leaving the Atocha Station depicts Adam’s sense of this bewildering intimacy,
suggesting that a narrative reckoning with his personal anxiety is inseparable from
the material conditions of the Anthropocene: ‘[a]ircraft noise was having strange
effects on finches. […] Why was I born between mirrors?’ (Lerner 2011: 181). As
Morton puts it, with hyperobjects, ‘I have become part of the mirror’s flesh’; art
endlessly reflects their penetration within and outside of the human (2013a: 28).
This realisation of viscosity is aesthetically conveyed when U. reflects upon oil
spills and Petr’s cancer. Although accessed through screens, the oil literally sticks
and reflects upon other surfaces (McCarthy 2015: 9-10). U.’s envisioning of Petr’s
condition superimposes the oil spill with cancer; both represent a glitch in the
system, the spreading of poisonous cells which manifest global disaster (cancer and
oil as ubiquitous killers) at the most intimate level: the human body. When Petr
describes his orange juice treatment, U. takes the orange tree as synecdoche for an
arid landscape, where ‘in every direction, oil wells burned, their smoke-plumes
blackening the sky’ and ‘the fruit itself’; by extension he pictures that ‘blackness’
‘being injected into Petr’ (McCarthy 2015: 85-86). This darkly reworks a Romantic
poetic gesture: the synecdoche in, for instance, John Keats’ ‘beaker full of the warm
South’ (2008: 286). In Satin Island, synecdoche invokes the relational breakdown of
self/world, resulting in the viscous horror of hyperobjects manifesting intimately and
elsewhere, from blackened landscapes to every tumorous cell. McCarthy’s poetics
collapse that capitalist rhetoric which splits controlled/natural disasters. Disease and
oil spills merge into what Thacker calls an ‘ambient plague’ (2011: 104),
disseminating questions of agency and blame into an all-pervasive recognition of
terrifying coexistence: ‘[i]f Petr’s flesh was turning black it was because he’d let the
world get right inside him’ (McCarthy 2015: 135).
Yet to ecologically consider what McCarthy calls this ‘nameless
blackness’ (2015: 135) of matter, we have to appreciate the form this blackness
takes. U. is critically engaged with the question of matter’s aesthetics, in turn
transforming oil into art object. One existential consequence of living among
hyperobjects is hypocrisy. Since hyperobjects outlive human time-scales and evade
the reifying attempts of scientific knowledge (the more we know, the stranger they
seem), the familiar, utilitarian perspective on global warming is found severely
lacking (Morton 2013a: 138). An ethical approach to hyperobjects needs to base
itself ‘on scales and scopes that hugely transcend normative self-interest’, while
recognising the relative value of individual ecological actions (Morton 2013a: 138).
Satin Island explicitly links aesthetics with eco-political events. U. responds to a
hypothetical critique that in his florid descriptions of oil spills he is aestheticising
‘nature’s defilement’, pointing out the hypocrisy of his detractors who would deem
the spill a ‘tragedy’ (McCarthy 2015: 107). As with petro-fiction’s critical ability to
expose ‘the fictive life of oil’—the benign narratives spun by energy corporations
(Macdonald 2013: 17)—U.’s speech highlights the irony of familiar petro-narratives.
An oil spill is not an accident, but in the true sense of tragedy the result of the oil
company’s hamartia, their capitalist greed.
Moreover, U. denounces as ‘kitsch’ (McCarthy 2015: 107) traditional
environmentalist critique, with its Romantic ideology of picturesque landscape that
sees oil as the trace of Man contaminating Nature. Such ontological division is
impossible in the time of hyperobjects; oil is Nature, the strange stranger whose
everyday familiarity (as plastic or petrol) becomes uncanny when realised at the
scale of disaster. The transcendental vision of Nature as ‘virginal and
pure’ (McCarthy 2015: 107) must be subsumed into a dark ecological aesthetic
which negotiates Anthropocene reality while recognising the inherent aporia within
human knowledge. Despite U.’s dismissal of Romantic aesthetics, the sublime
ironically persists in his own rhetoric, indicating the object’s withdrawal, the
tautological implication of concealed essence that is ‘nature’s hidden
nature’ (McCarthy 2015: 107). We see this in U.’s rapturous syntax but also in the
religious imagery that persists throughout Satin Island, from the ‘blackened cherubs’
of oil-stained cloud patches to the portrayal of cancer-sick Petr as ‘an angel’, ‘deeply
penetrated’ by the world (McCarthy 2015: 111,135). By melding the spiritual and
physical, McCarthy renders a materialised sublime that evokes the scales of
hyperobjects beyond human comprehension.
In addition to sublimity, the concept of kitsch deserves further ecological
consideration. Once again, U. ironically practises what he preaches against:
McCarthy’s prose, at its most lyric, veers into the synesthetic allure of kitsch. U. first
encounters the trash-heaps of Staten Island in a dream. Flying above the waste, he
finds his dream-self

gazing in awe and fascination at the glowing ooze, its colours as they
morphed from vermillion yellow to mercurial silver, then on to purple, umber,
burnt sienna, the foil-like flashing of its folds and gashes as light flowed
across them.

(McCarthy 2015: 131)

Here, McCarthy’s polychromatic poetics exhibit the trash-heap as phantasmagoria

made tangible. This isn’t a Latour litany: McCarthy’s description hones on the
sensory properties of objects rather than listing the individual waste items
themselves. The obsession with surfaces, reflections and accidental qualities over
essences could be read as McCarthy’s articulation of matter’s formlessness,
Georges Bataille’s notion of l’informe that he weds the INS to in The Mattering of
Matter (McCarthy and Critchley 2012: 226). In relation to ecology, however,
McCarthy’s ekphrastic description transforms the trash-heap into an accumulative
art-form which itself hails the strange futurity of a hyperobject.
As with Lerner’s ambient attentiveness, McCarthy’s alliterative and assonant
poetics slow down our reading, estranging quotidian perceptions of trash by
depicting it in saturated, dreamlike form. Morton calls for a radical ecological kitsch
which would poetically render the sensory effects of art; rather than providing an
Adornian zone of transcendence, kitsch art is aware of its tackily ersatz nature,
revealing in turn the cultural construction of ‘original’ nature (2007: 150). Radical
kitsch remains ‘sentimental’ but also focused on the object’s properties; rather than
performing the ‘high, cool’ perspective of the critical theorist, it carries in form the
fetishised trace of the object itself (Morton 2007: 153-155). The aestheticisation of
Staten Island’s garbage spills quite literally into Satin Island’s genesis as art-object,
as the dream concludes with a performative announcement of the words ‘Satin
Island’ (McCarthy 2015: 131). If this is the novel’s origin myth, then Satin Island is
more than just fictional space; McCarthy reifies his sensory poetics as technology for
ecological tuning.
Enacting via mise-en-abyme Satin Island’s aesthetic germination, U.’s dream
sequence recalls the topic of medial aesthetics. McCarthy proposes inauthenticity as
an ethics for representing matter (McCarthy and Critchley 2012: 226), or what OOO
calls an object’s withdrawn essence. U.’s TED-style lecture on the aesthetics of oil
spills satirises hubristic ideologies of scientific objectivity or rationalist human
knowledge. Morton refers to this as ‘beautiful soul syndrome’, the ethical posturing-
at-a-distance: the person who critiques the world’s corruption and sets himself apart
from it, even though remaining hypocritically entangled in such corruption (2007: 13).
The ethical positioning of 10:04 and Satin Island, by contrast, involves an immersed
self-awareness, as Ben and U. constantly refer to their respective complicity within
the systems they critique. To some extent, anxiety is their overarching condition; they
are conscious of their ontological status within the ecological mesh, not above or
outside it. When inside the Museum of Natural History, Ben’s anxiety at being
Roberto’s temporary caregiver is expressed through increasingly nonhuman
analogies: ‘I was no more a functioning adult than Pluto was a planet’; ‘I felt despair
spread through me like contrast dye’ (Lerner 2014: 148). This reinforces a sense of
human anxiety as inextricable from the wider existential panic of the Anthropocene,
that sense of the ‘contrast dye’ of knowledge showing up more shadows than clarity
as hyperobjects phase in and out of focus.
Avoiding the trap of beautiful soul syndrome, U. and Ben as narrators make
us frequently aware of mediated aesthetic process, exposing how reality, like fiction,
is structured by both gaps and relations, the known and unknown. Just as Satin
Island becomes the supplementary result of U.’s failure to write the Great Report,
Ben’s ongoing literary project evolves into10:04, a ‘flickering’ between ‘fiction’ and
‘nonfiction’ (Lerner 2014: 94). In Satin Island, the ecological outcome of mise-en-
abyme is an interrogation of writing’s material significance. With the Anthropocene,
writing comes to denote the unifying of process and product, as our human ‘species-
being’ manifests as ‘both subject and object’, writing geological history and in turn
being written as resulting climate disasters carve new chronicles within human-time
(Boes and Marshall 2014: 64). As U. puts it, ‘[w]hen oil spills, Earth opens its
archives’ (McCarthy 2015: 109). The blank pages which book-end Satin Island’s
narrative are ornamented with visual representations of dripping oil, implying an
insistence on materiality. If fiction is a virtual space, then its poetics extend into the
actual; there’s a continuous ontographical analogy between geological inscription
and literature’s constitution as ink and timber.
With such material intimacy at stake, U. realises that writing the Great Report
of the now requires a position other than the anthropologist’s analytic high ground:

What if just coexisting with these objects and this person […] allowing it to
occupy me, to blot and soak me up […] maybe was part of the Great Report?
What if the Report might […] be lived, be be-d, rather than written?

(McCarthy 2015: 71)

There’s a shift here from representative strategy to ontological experience; the

aesthetic impulse becomes a desire to be in the context of coexistence, the
conscious osmosis with sensory data. If Satin Island is an anthropological manifesto,
it bears less the teleological declarations of McCarthy’s modernist forebears and
more the contemporary uncertainties of ecological awareness. McCarthy’s use of
rhetorical questions, the ellipsis of ‘[w]hat if…?’ (2015: 71), implies negative
capability, a recognised hesitancy that nonetheless refuses to collapse into
postmodernism’s paralysing irony. U. persists in his project despite the murkiness of
its nature, making obsessive connections with religious zeal, jumbling semantic
possibilities like ‘Scrabble pieces’ (McCarthy 2015: 164). Similarly, although we
cannot isolate the cause of global warming, a continuous questioning of correlating
effects remains ethically imperative.
 U.’s search for meaning and form for the contemporary era culminates in a
suitably open conclusion. Rather than board the ferry to Staten Island, to encounter
the ‘miles of landfill […] being transformed into nature parks’ (McCarthy 2015: 133),
U. hovers at the terminal then retreats, ultimately insisting on the interval’s fictional
significance. In this moment of hesitancy, McCarthy’s prose directly blends
aesthetics and ethics, with phrases like ‘great holocaust of light’ weighting a
transcendent metaphor with historical implication, whose Enlightenment promise of
knowledge paradoxically results in the opposite, the ‘retinal’ after-burn of
‘dark[ness]’ (2015: 172-173). U. does not visit the faux-pastoral of Staten Island, its
commercial restoration as tourist destination, but rather stares at an ‘anachronistic’
‘homeless guy’ (McCarthy 2015: 173), whose homelessness perhaps prophesises
humanity’s geographical and existential unmooring within the Anthropocene.
Similarly, Ben elsewhere notes the ‘night air that was or was not laced with
anachronistic blossoms’ (Lerner 2014: 108), preserving fictional possibility alongside
metaphysical uncertainty, as opposed to classical realism’s determined reality. These
anachronistic objects of narrative indicate fiction’s ability to include the detritus of
existence, the ‘offslew of the real’, its ‘pulpy mass’ (McCarthy 2015: 115). The
material expanse between the actual and virtual emerges as dark ecological
awareness of coexistence with strange strangers.
While Satin Island closes on the ‘uncomfortable’ (McCarthy 2015: 173)
encounter with a stranger, 10:04 is persistently concerned with what ethical and
aesthetic form contact with the Other might take. Ben’s obsession with Walt
Whitman, the American poet of the Everyman, is indelibly tied to his sense of plural
and collective futurity in the face of uncertain disaster. Early in the novel he frames
his narratological position thus: ‘“I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously
[…] I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of
the vulnerable grid”’ (Lerner 2014: 4).  Where Petr waxes lyrical about abstract
‘network architecture’ (McCarthy 2015: 27), Ben recalls the proximate vulnerability of
this grid at its material level, the flickering of electricity in a storm. As with U.’s
stubborn attempts at meaning and transcendence amidst failure, sincere affection
and expression marks 10:04 as a distinctly metamodern novel. Metamodernism is an
emergent ‘structure of feeling’, describing an ‘oscillation’ between the ‘detachment’ of
postmodern irony and ‘commitment’ of modern sincerity (Velmeulen and van den
Akker 2017). It thus notes an affective and aesthetic shift within the arts, mapped
against the ontological and ecological insecurity of contemporary times.
This metamodern outlook manifests in 10:04’s anterior openness, forged in
the intimacy between narrator and reader. Ben addresses the reader as a collective
you from the future; the second-person plural inviting that epochal sense of
ourselves as species. The novel’s final paragraphs shift from the governing past
tense to the conditional, oscillating between the simple present and simple future,
closing with the declarative lines:

at the time of writing, as I lean against the chain-link fence […] I am looking
back at the totalled city in the second person plural. I know it’s hard to
understand / I am with you, and I know how it is.

(Lerner 2014: 240)

Here we are hailed into a shared sense of presence, the collision of ‘the time of
writing’ and reading. While both Satin Island and 10:04 metafictionally acknowledge
material feedback loops, Lerner more explicitly addresses their ethical implications.
Looking backwards and ahead at once, Ben evokes a vertiginous sense of
Anthropocene temporality, emphasised in the page opposite with reproduced photos
of shooting stars and a jet-plane—hyperobjects of modernity and beyond at
nonhuman scales. Where the insistent hope of Reagan’s State of the Union Address
calls for a messianic ‘rousing wonder’ (Lerner 2014: 241), we might suggest that
there’s a retained commitment to persistence, transcendence and futurity in the face
of pending, unknown disaster—that which is ‘hard to understand’.
If Satin Island ends with the breaking of a gaze, 10:04 maintains this
connection; only, it’s not so much eye-contact—Emmanuel Levinas’ largely
anthropocentric ethics of the Face—but shared perspective.7 As Ben walks
alongside Alex, maintaining parallel vision (Lerner 2014: 8), Ben and the reader
share this gaze in moments of confrontation, sublimity and wonder. Lerner’s ability to
make pure event of narrative preserves virtuality. The indeterminacy of the final
virgule implies a slice of time, a moment frozen like a piece of poem preserved in
fiction; as Adam says of poetry quoted in prose, ‘what was communicated was less a
particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility’ (Lerner 2011: 9). This
indeterminacy is the condition for coexistence, an uncanny enmeshment with
strange strangers. As line, the fence is a physical virgule, splitting the virtual contact
between our vision and Ben’s; between past and present, as this scene reduplicates
his previous crossing of the bridge. This ecological thought comprises the poetic
possibility of empathy in the narrative present, our multiple temporalities which briefly
meet in Lerner’s text.
Such temporal networking is aesthetically extended within McCarthy’s
installation of Satin Island at London’s ICA, where the novel is staged as a
provocatively titled corporate Think Tank (2015). By spilling the novel’s hypothetical
archive into material form, exhibiting its processual media (from mind-maps to news
clippings), McCarthy playfully enacts realism in the form of objects. Involving talks
from real anthropologists and media consultants, the exhibition preserves a space of
actuality and emergence, connecting U.’s project with ‘real’ discourse. The text
becomes a meeting point of mediating actants—a literalised ‘speculative
anthropology’ (Blacklock 2015), or indeed, speculative realism. By opening the novel
to an actualised project, McCarthy implicitly offers fiction’s ecological and political
potential as a site of cross-disciplinary exchange. Meanwhile, Lerner’s virtual poetics
stage ‘mediacy’ itself in the reader’s temporary presence within literary space, as
Adam remarks of John Ashbery’s poetry (2011: 91). Since Lerner’s novels comprise

7 Rather than dismissing Levinas’ ethics entirely, we may however follow Tom Sparrow in
recuperating the Face for a nonhuman ethics based on sensing the Other: being ‘sensitive to
them’, in order to work, mutually, ‘toward a pluralistic future’ (2013: 101). As the protagonist
of ‘The Golden Vanity’ admits struggling to ‘read’ human faces, his date talks of ‘paraidolia’,
whereby the brain assembles a familiar pattern (often a human face) from random
nonhuman stimuli (Lerner 2014: 69). This phenomenon aesthetically demonstrates uncanny
intimacy between strange strangers, a form of visual anthropomorphism which nevertheless
cleaves virtual possibilities for an ‘“ecodelic” insight’ where we recognise our involvement ‘in
a densely interconnected ecosystem for which contemporary tactics of human identity are
insufficient’ (Doyle 2011: 20).
a braiding of discourses, we might see his work as ‘a vast serial project’, threading
narrative, criticism and lyric to comprise a sense of contemporariness (Katz 2017:
319), akin to Rabinow’s moving ratio of modernity.
Such examples suggest the novel offers a curatorial form whose intertextuality
facilitates an emergent awareness of coexistence in the age of hyperobjects. What
distinguishes the novel from other kinds of ecological art is the comprehensive scope
of its engagement with other discourses, at the level of both material relations and
individual consciousness. While Eno’s music, freed from the anthropocentric
shackles of human language, might sensually attune to hyperobjects, a novel can
situate the ethical significance of this aesthetic experience through conscious
reflection, the feedback loops constituting narrative.
As metafictional, medial novels, 10:04 and Satin Island include the kinds of
environmental aesthetics championed by Morton (2007), from radical kitsch to
ambient poetics. They eschew the ethical reductionism of beautiful soul syndrome in
favour of an ouroboric consciousness, evoking reality’s enmeshed structure. As
McCarthy says of the Think Tank exhibit, ‘the book-as-object re-enters as a fiction
within this bigger fiction […] like a Mobius strip, eating its own tail’ (Corby and Callus
2015: 138). The ecological thought involves a self-devouring recognition of
Anthropocene reality as resonant feedback loops of action, awareness and affect at
various scales. Ultimately, the novels’ gestures towards sublimity, a throwback to
Romantic aesthetics, pull us sincerely into the future via the past, forging an open
form which does not impose static and mimetic closure on the present ecological
situation.
 Conclusion: Weird Realism for Virtual Futures

The title of Heather Phillipson’s poem, ‘Some Kind of Memento Mori’, plays upon the
semantic plurality of ‘kind’, implicitly noting kinship between the poem as thing
alongside the extinct ‘woolly mammoths’ which the speaker elegises (2009: 11). The
poem condenses vast geologic time into literally a flashbulb moment, as the faltering
lightbulb makes electricity present-at-hand, recalling its deep material history as
hyperobject: ‘[r]emoval of the bulb is a change of epoch’ (Phillipson 2009: 11). With
conversational intimacy—‘[o]h yes’, ‘[t]hese days’ (Phillipson 2009: 11)—Phillipson
portrays the present discursive scene against absent species, revealing the
chiaroscuro effect of deep epochal awareness at domestic levels: the light of
knowledge alongside intangible ontological shadow.
While poems can provide flickering snapshots of dark ecological
consciousness, the novel’s scope pursues the ethical potentiality of the virtual as it
plays out in narrative time. As with Phillipson’s lightbulb, Lerner literally illumines a
temporal node in 10:04, as the novelist within ‘The Golden Vanity’ pictures his virtual
protagonist at the same ‘gaslight’ beside which he stands in Ben’s fiction: ‘he
imagined […] that the gaslight cut across worlds and not just years, that the author
and the narrator, while they couldn’t face each other, could intuit each other’s
presence by facing the same light’ (Lerner 2014: 67). The problem with Levinas’
ethics of the Face is that we cannot directly confront future generations of humans
and nonhumans. The object-orientated aesthetics of 10:04 and Satin Island offer an
ecological ethics grounded in vicarious encounters with hyperobjects, whose plural
dimensions are negotiated within fiction’s utopian potentials. With Lerner’s abyssal
chain of protagonists and U.’s Great Report becoming the virtualised version of
Maurice Blanchot’s (2002) Book-to-Come, embodied in Satin Island itself, such
novelistic tactics of mise-en-abyme stage the feedback loops of Anthropocene
temporality and ecological coexistence.
In this aesthetic vein, understanding fiction’s ethical potential involves
reconciling OOO’s philosophical realism (based in objects’ withdrawn essence) with
literary realism. Discussing this symbiosis of the literary and philosophical, Harman
claims that literature’s realist quality is precisely its resistance to paraphrase, the
impossibility of perfect mimesis: ‘[n]o literal statement is congruent with reality itself
[…]. The meaning of being might even be defined as untranslatability. Language
(and everything else) is obliged to become an art of allusion’ (2012: 16). As objects
interact on a vicarious, sensual level, literature can present the dynamic relations of
ecological enmeshment while retaining a sense of each object’s irreducible reality
and potential agency. Realism’s aesthetic dimension can thus be ethical. As Bennett
puts it, our ‘ethical task’ is ‘to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality’ (2010:
14); to recognise the interdependent agency of the human and nonhuman within the
Anthropocene. While Harman’s study is largely confined to horror literature, I have
focused on novels encompassing multiple registers, forms and disciplines; novels
which reterritorialise literary realism in the context of dark ecology.
Where Thacker (2011) posits a philosophy of ‘horror’ to imagine a future world
without humans, these novels speculate upon various aesthetic projects whose
contemporary focus considers humankind’s cultural enmeshment with other objects.
Lerner and McCarthy’s tentacular imagery signifies less the monstrous unknown of
Lovecraft’s Cthulhu8 or the dystopian sprawl of anachronous foliage in Ballard’s The
Drowned World (1962), and more the symbiotic branches of dark ecology’s sensory
mesh. While Harman, Thacker and other speculative realists note horror’s ability to
signify the ontological gap between appearance and essence, I’ve attempted to
demonstrate how ambient poetics, kitsch and the sublime attune to the durational
strangeness of hyperobjects, while reflexively highlighting writing’s significance
within ecological feedback loops.
What links Lerner and McCarthy’s metamodern affect to ecological ethics is
the oscillation between light and shadow, access and withdrawal, irony and sincerity.
Ben and U.’s persistent search for meaning in the face of anxiety, absence and
failure represents a fictional model for grappling with humankind’s paradoxically
intensified and suppressed significance within the Anthropocene: the moment we
recognise ourselves as both culpable actants and material objects.
While this dissertation’s scope restricts my attention to divergent nuances
within OOO, I have shown how its thinkers provide a philosophical toolkit for tuning
into the reciprocal channels of aesthetic practise and ecological ethics through
examples of contemporary fiction. McCarthy’s self-aware ontography dramatises
writing’s potentials and limits in relation to challenges posed by hyperobjects such as

8 For alternative ecological uses of Cthulhu as germinating assemblage, see Haraway 2015.
oil and technology. Lerner, however, perhaps more successfully translates an ethics
of action and collective awareness from similar aesthetic grounds. Since 10:04 is set
in and Satin Island ends in New York, we might contest that these novels add to the
city’s legacy as the geographic nexus of petroculture, environmental crisis and
disaster capitalism in recent works, from Roland Emmerich’s apocalyptic blockbuster
The Day After Tomorrow (2004) to Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008). While Zadie
Smith (2008) pits Netherland’s ‘lyrical realism’ against Remainder’s avant-garde
tactics, Satin Island comprises an object-orientated realism: speculatively attuned to
hyperobjects, textually self-aware and in turn revealing the weirdly enmeshed,
elusive constitution of reality itself. The triple engagement with New York, realism
and hyperobjects in these texts represents an attempt to tease out the affective,
sensory and ethical experience of living in late-capitalism and the time of the
Anthropocene; a vertiginous sense of the contemporary attuned to epochal
temporalities.
If New York is the heart of capitalist modernity, with its condensed effects of
risk, terror, financial speculation and environmental disaster, it’s politically significant
that the contemporary ecological novel chooses the city, rather than nature writing’s
traditional rural setting, as its final scene. If literature is a mapping of death, in the
INS sense, then we might consider the novel as a cartography of hyperobjects,
tracing their relational appearance as they phase in and out of human existence and
technological, writerly mediation. Like a map, these fictions comprise less the closed
destination of ecological awareness, but provide one kind of affective, ethical
apparatus, sketching that ‘illuminating constellation’ of ‘the long view’, mapping the
writer’s past-present with the readerly ‘“now”’ and the possible nows of tomorrow
(Lerner 2011: 175).
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List of Figures

Figure 1. ‘The Lake Project 3, 2001’ (Maisel 2017).

Figure 2. ‘A Heap of Language’ (Smithson 1996: 61).