Ambience and the ‘Symbiotic Real’: An Ecocritical Reading of It Must Have Been Dark By Then

The suggestion that a crucial response to the unfolding damage of the Anthropocene might be to develop a feeling of solidarity with spoons is undeniably a little weird. Why, in an age of mass extinction, might we need to focus on feeling a deep and meaningful connection with a piece of cutlery? This, however, is exactly the project taken up in Timothy Morton’s Humankind (2017), their book seeking to develop non-discriminate solidarity with non-human entities, of which cutlery is just one example. Morton has become one of the foremost ecological critics writing today, underpinning their work with Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and its radical disruption of anthropocentric notions of being. In 1 Humankind , Morton takes their ontological approach to ecocriticism and applies it to Marxism, a largely anthropocentric mode of thought, looking to rehabilitate Marxist ideals into offering an ecological, non-anthropocentric way of existing in the world. For Morton, the anthropocentrism of Marxist thought is a ‘bug’ to be removed, ‘not a feature.’ Morton’s 2 project in Humankind provides an exciting new perspective on ecocriticism, one I see as having an as-yet untapped relationship with theories of ambience. This essay draws on Morton’s ecological Marxism in dialogue with the ambient poetics of the Ambient Literature Project, viewing them as parallel fields which can be usefully folded into one another to develop their common ground. The Ambient Literature Project was a ‘thirty-month research … project led by Professor Jon Dovey at the University of the West of England’s Digital Cultures Research Centre’ which focused on investigating ‘situated writing practices in which text is able to respond to the site of reading’; what they term “ambient literature”. The project had multiple outcomes, including a critical book 3 containing academic perspectives on ambience and ambient literature, empirical research on locational technologies and literary form, and the production of three creative texts. This essay draws heavily from the academic work contained within Ambient Literature (2021),

IMHBD is an unusual literary experience in that it requires the reader to engage with both a printed book and an app on their smartphone, with the latter both creating a digital map as the story progresses and providing a soundtrack of narration, instruction, field recordings, and original music. IMHBD's generative map guides the reader to walk through whichever location they choose to situate their reading / listening, layering experiences from areas around the world affected by environmental crises onto this situated literary experience. As Hayler puts it when he introduces the text in his chapter 'Objects, Places, and Entanglements', 'the themes of the narrative often emerge subtly as the reader, script, and audio narration dance around one another with planned steps and room for interpretation '. 4 This unique multimodality and locationality allows the text to develop an interesting relationship with ambience and ecology that underpins this essay's analysis.
In 'Critical Ambience', Dovey and Hayler engage with this relationship, drawing attention to IMHBD as evidence of how 'ambient cultural practices can be reframed as critically focused experiences'. This stance undermines prevailing views of ambient media as 5 simply 'either passive backgrounds or immersive entertainment', positions often underpinned by Brian Eno's assertion that Ambient Music 'must be as ignorable as it is interesting'. Their analysis of IMHBD explores how the critically focused experiences 6 cultivated by the text might be used to engage with ecology and environment by analysing, critiquing, and extending Morton's application of ambient poetics in Ecology Without Nature (2009). Throughout the book, Morton attempts to establish ways of reading which reject an anthropocentric image of "nature" and replace it with an ecological understanding of the world. As a part of these new ecocritical reading practices, Morton evokes ambience and its associations with being surrounded 'to make strange the idea of environment', a use 'ambiguous' and 'often at odds with itself', something which they navigate by reconsidering its use through the lens of the critical ambience developed in IMHBD. 8 In the 10 years between the publication of Ecology Without Nature and Humankind the connection between ambience and ecological thought apparently disappeared from Morton's writing. Ambience's disappearance in this period was arguably because of the ambiguous and contradictory nature identified by Hayler and Dovey, with Morton never fleshing out their ambient poetics so that they would be usefully transferrable into future works. However, I see 'Critical Ambience' as doing this work of fleshing-out the ecological potential of ambience through its engagement with IMHBD. By elucidating ambience's ecocritical potential, Dovey and Hayler refigure ambience so that it might be usefully rehabilitated back into working with Morton's project in Humankind.
This essay's "folding-in" of Morton and the Ambient Literature Project, which this critical refiguring of ambience facilitates, reveals ambience as a phenomenon uniquely suited to attuning us to the radical ecological ontology outlined in Humankind. My use of "attuning" in this essay draws both on the idea of 'being co-constituted by our environments'

The Symbiotic Real
Firstly, it is important to understand exactly what kind of ontology Humankind might ask the reader to become attuned to. From the outset of the text, Morton seeks to replace anthropocentric theorisations of ontology with that of the symbiotic real, an ecological conception of being-in-the-world underpinned by OOO. Morton critiques Heidegger's concept of being-in-the-world, as even though he captures being as always contextual and situated, 'he irrationally restricts [this] to humans', therefore destroying any possibility of 11 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, p. 64. 10 Dovey and Hayler, 'Critical Ambience ', p. 156. 9 Ibid., p. 152.; Timothy Morton, Being Ecological (London: Pelican Books, 2018), p. 79. 8 Ibid., p. 150. ecological world-sharing.
In developing being-in-the-world beyond this damaging 12 anthropocentrism, Morton describes how the symbiotic real refers to the state 'in which entities are related in a non-total, ragged way … In symbiosis, it's unclear which is the top symbiont, and the relationship between the beings is jagged, incomplete.' In the symbiotic 13 real, all beings within the biosphere, whether they are a human, a tree, a smartphone, or a spoon are partial, incomplete, and constantly engaged in messy co-constitutive relationships with other beings. In these relationships any host / parasite distinction between symbionts starts to seem irrelevant, shifting the emphasis towards a consideration of how beings are mutually entangled in complex symbioses. As Morton puts it, entities are 'messy heaps of other things' rather than distinct and independent. 14 The symbiotic real captures the ontological state which arises from this messy world are radically and traumatically separated from how things actually exist. Morton draws a causal link between this 'Severing' and the 'large-scale violence' of current and historical human actions by suggesting that fascism is symptomatic of the refusal to recognise that we ontologically rely on all the beings in the biosphere. 20 The symbiotic real therefore seeks to refigure our understanding of being-in-the-world, resonating with the pursuit of 'new subjectivities that escape the Cartesian self' identified by Dovey and Hayler in IMHBD's critical ambience. This 21 resonance begins to refigure ambience as an experiential mode uniquely suited to an undoing of the Severing and attuning the reader to existence within the symbiotic real. We might therefore suggest that the IMHBD's 'environmentally aware modes of attention' have the potential to allow us to 'experience the fact that we [are] embedded in' the symbiotic real, realising the ecocritical potential of ambience by bringing perceptible reality closer to the ontological real. In the ways in which it cultivates this experience, IMHBD has the potential 22 to go some way towards healing the wounds of the Severing and slowing the proliferation of its trauma, allowing the reader to experience existence within the symbiotic real, not just understand it from some theoretical distance. My close reading of IMHBD traces some of the ways in which a reader might undergo this experiential attunement with Morton's ontology.

Symbiosis and Entanglement
For Hayler and Dovey, works of ambient literature directly position the reader as 'an agent … situated within (and as a part of) the environment that the text seeks to discover.' At certain 23 points in the text's guided walk, IMHBD's narrator asks the reader to seek out features of their environment such as places of dwelling, water, or wood, enlisting them to directly engage with the non-human entities that constitute their immediate surroundings. That this request is delivered via audiotext is significant to how the reader goes on to engage with their environment. As Dovey, Abba, and Pullinger identify in their introduction to Ambient Literature, 'when listening to a story the eyes are free to look. The environment of the listener can become the setting for the narrative.' Whilst reading printed text is also always  Whilst access to digital technology is increasing, as of January 2021 only 59.5% of the global population were active internet users and investment in technology still ranges widely across class, ethnicity, disability, and age lines. My identification of a digitally entangled subject corresponds to a significant, but not totalising, portion of the global population: Joseph Johnson Ibid., p. 78. 25 Hayler, 'Objects, Places, and Entanglements'. complex "relying-on" which fuels the symbiotic real, undermining any semblance of beings as independent of one another.
When the narrator asks the reader to 'find some wood' and to make physical contact with it, it prompts them to similarly 'look again' at an entity which is often encountered as mundane or uninteresting. This novel mode of engagement refigures wood as newly 31 interesting, recentring the reader's engagement with it as a constituent part of the ambient literary experience. Wood's presence in the reader's surroundings is intensified so that it becomes something which accommodates a deep attention to how it exists within the world. For instance, the narrator prompts the listener to think of how the wood they have found is 'a porous thing, absorbing so much from its surroundings', with 'breath and fumes in the air, dust and dirt blown in the wind, sunlight and rain, all leaving their traces' upon its being. A part of this interaction (depending on where the reader finds themselves at that 33 moment) might involve making the reader think of how a bench might absorb pollution from a nearby road, thereby fundamentally changing its being-in-the-world. This guided attention towards wood's ontological porousness realises a new level of consideration for how all aspects of the world become entangled into wood's being, and reflexively, how wood and the agency that wood enacts upon the world help constitute other (including our own) entangled states of being. An acknowledgement of wood as a 'porous thing', constantly engaged in processes of uneasy symbiosis, therefore begins to shift our perception towards seeing beings as 'messy heaps.' This perceptual change rejects the humanistic notions of the autonomy 34 outlined by Belsey and helps guide the reader towards recognising 'new subjectivities that escape the Cartesian self.' In its porousness, a bench is constantly engaged in uneasy 35 symbioses with all the beings and processes that surround it, whether that be pollution, humidity or the people that sit on it. The attention drawn by IMHBD to the porousness of the 35 Belsey, p. 8.; Dovey and Hayler,'Critical Ambience',p. 141. 34 Ibid. (Audio Narration); Verso, Morton in Conversation. 33 Speakman (Audio Narration). 32 Dovey and Hayler,'Critical Ambience',p. 156. 31 Duncan Speakman, It Must Have Been Dark By Then (Bristol: Taylor Brothers, 2017), (Audio Narration); Hayler,'Objects,Places,and Entanglements',p. 87. bench therefore forces the reader to reckon with the fact that the bench's being-in-the-world necessitates entanglement in an innumerable number of non-human symbiotic processes.
This interaction allows the reader to become more acutely aware of the complex, vital, and non-human processes of symbiosis which constantly envelop them. A recognition of these processes lends itself to developing a genuine solidarity with non-human objects through their ontological co-constitution with and of human subjects. Whilst this connection would likely have seemed ridiculous beforehand, the way in which IMHBD's narrative attunes the reader to symbioses in their surroundings refigures the connection as totally logical. Whether what is found when prompted is a tree, a doorframe, or a bench, the text highlights the way in which those entities are entangled in the ontological processes of mutual reliance central to both Morton's theorisation of ecological ontology and Hayler, and Dovey and Hayler's work on the entangled potential of ambient literature.

Subscendence
For Morton, an attunement to the entangled, symbiotic nature of being necessarily demands a recognition of what they call 'subscendence', a seemingly counterintuitive claim that 'the whole is always less than the sum of its parts.' As Morton says, 'we keep … nodding along' 36 when people say: "the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts". After all, it's just 37 common sense, right? Morton, however, disagrees, arguing that 'this truism is one of the greatest inhibitors of world sharing.' By reckoning with existence as a part of the symbiotic 38 real Morton argues that one must acknowledge that 'parts are not just mechanical components of wholes' and there can be 'be genuine surprise and novelty in the world' in the ways in which parts exist beyond the wholes to which we tend to reduce them. The 39 language Morton uses to articulate how things subscend the whole is that: A (all the parts of a thing) 'is so much more than' B (those parts viewed as a whole). 40 Therefore, subscendence and the way that things constantly subscend wholes force the reader to reckon with the fact that something like a human, a river, or a phenomenon like climate change or neoliberalism is ontologically smaller than all the parts which make up that whole. This claim leaves room for those parts to wriggle out from the body of the whole 40 Ibid., p. 102. 39 Ibid., p. 102. 38 Morton,Humankind,p. 101. 37 Verso, Morton in Conversation 36 Morton,Humankind,p. 101. and to engage with the world on their own terms in new and surprising ways, potentializing real and meaningful change in the world. For instance, through subscendence, a seemingly impenetrable whole such as neoliberalism might become ontologically destabilised and open to new, positive possibilities of change.
The way in which IMHBD's reader engages with their immediate surroundings is shaped by simultaneous engagement with the memories conveyed in the printed book helps to develop an experience of the world as subscendent. The text's 'underlying notion that whatever you're doing right now, there's someone else doing something similar in a similar location but probably in a totally different social and political context' provides the conditions for entities to be able to wriggle out from being reduced to mechanical parts of a static whole, drawing them into surprising co-existence with and within other entities. 41 Perhaps the non-human entity in the text which best encourages this experience of the world as subscendent is water. As Hayler identifies, the three locations which the text takes the reader to: Louisiana, the Sahara, and Latvia, are 'each marked by water crises', crises that become palimpsestuously layered over the reader's immediate surroundings. 42 Given this commonality of water crises, arguably the most critical of these moments of layering is when the narrator asks the reader 'can you find some water now?' After 43 guiding the reader towards a similar deep attention towards water's complex being-in-the-world, the narrator asks the reader to open the printed book and, with this ontological attention in mind, to read chapter five: a recount of rising water levels in Louisiana. Speakman's recounting of his journey to Louisiana highlights the encroachment 44 of the Mississippi river across the state, as the structures designed to contain it begin to fail and the federal government withdraws protection for those subsequently put at risk by this.
The palimpsestuous way in which the reader engages with this reality, consciously engaging a water source in their environment, creates a collapse of the distance, both physically and conceptually, between themselves and the water crises highlighted by Speakman's writing.
As Hayler says, 'Speakman … always seems to be saying "that place could be right here; you could be right there".' With this new feeling that the reader could be somewhere else, or 45 that somewhere else could be where they are, the water which they encounter -whether river, pond, canal or drain -is revealed to be so much more than it might at first seem. When 45 Hayler,'Objects,Places,and Entanglements',p. 92. 44 Ibid., pp. 35-46. 43 Speakman (Audio Narration). 42 Hayler,'Objects,Places,and Entanglements',p. 86.; For more on palimpsests and ambience see : Hayler,'Objects,Places,and Entanglements'. 41 Kate Pullinger and Duncan Speakman, 'It Must Have Been Dark by Then: An Artist Interview with Duncan Speakman', in Ambient Literature, ed. by Tom Abba, Jonathan Dovey, and Kate Pullinger (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), p. 104-5. read alongside Speakman's account of the worsening flooding crisis in Louisiana, the way the reader situates the water in their surroundings might slip from simply a part of a pond to being a part of a global network of water surplus and deficit, or similarly slip into being a part of the threat of rising water levels through the text's palimpsestuous layering. If, for instance, the reader is situated by the river Thames in this moment of layering, suddenly that river might become the Mississippi menacingly meandering through the centre of London, it might be rising upwards towards buildings, it might become a threat. The line between text and environment becomes porous, at moments seeming to collapse altogether as features of Louisiana become features of the reader's surroundings. In this way, IMHBD allows, previously rigid boundaries between separate wholes to morph and collapse, as Hayler states allowing different perceived realities to live 'on top of one another', driving the things which surround the reader to subscend any reduction to mechanical parts of static wholes. 46 The way that IMHBD introduces subscendence ensures that the experience of tuning into this aspect of the symbiotic real is an intensely, 'critically focused experience.' By 47 subverting one of the 'greatest inhibitors of world sharing' in the way that the reader perceives their surroundings, IMHBD facilitates a greater ability to undo the 'Severing', and therefore to share our world with non-humans. For Morton, a recognition of subscendence 48 in the world is necessarily a recognition that 'humankind is a fuzzy, subscendent whole that includes and implies other lifeforms.' As the reader experiences IMHBD, it becomes clear 49 that surprise, novelty, and change are present in the world beyond human correlation, in rivers, in benches, in spoons, even within their own body. This final point totally undermines any humanistic categorisation of the human subject as 'unified …and autonomous', going some way towards healing the trauma of the "Severing". 50 * * *

Conclusion -The Walk Back
Towards the end of IMHBD, the reader reaches 'the edge of [their] map', 'the furthest point of [their] journey.' This does not mark the end of the text, however. At this moment of 51 seeming finality, the narrator tells the reader that 'every person that walks these stories will create their own map, but this one is yours. And this is the moment where you'll walk 51 Speakman (Audio Narration). 50 Belsey,p. 8. 49 Ibid., p. 120. 48 Morton, Humankind, p. 101. 47 Dovey and Hayler, 'Critical Ambience ', p. 141. 46 Ibid., p. 92.

Moveable Type 13
through it.' The reader puts away their book, looks away from the screen of their device and 52 retraces the route they took to get from where they started to the edge of their map, guided only by the narration that continues to play in their headphones. This walk back draws together all the perceptual shifts that the text has facilitated, leaving those changes not as entirely intelligible, literary mediation, but simply as a new, completely sensible way of existing within the world. This unmediated feeling of the return walk is captured in the testimony of an IMHBD reader: When … I was told to walk back, I was worried that I wouldn't know the way but then when I started walking my body just told me. 53 It is in this largely unguided, physically intuitive process of returning to the start of their "map" that the text most fully realises the ontological attunement which has underpinned this essay. The attention cultivated towards symbiosis and subscendence on the walk out doesn't simply evaporate away from an engagement with page and screen. Instead, these two features of the symbiotic real are tied together and manifested in a feeling of indiscriminate solidarity with non-human entities. Morton terms this 'inner dynamic of action based on a readily available solidarity that includes non-humans' 'rocking'. When the reader walks 54 back towards the point where they first opened the app, they walk back in a state much closer to "rocking" than they would have prior to encountering IMHBD, thus bringing their reality closer to the (symbiotic) real. Whilst Morton usefully theorises this state, using it to call for a new 'theory of action' in philosophy, IMHBD extends it by providing the means to realise "rocking" as immediate experience. This phenomenological solidarity with the ecological 55 world imbues non-humans with a sense of vibrancy in the way that they adapt beyond human correlation: wriggling, shifting, and enacting real and meaningful agency through symbiosis and subscendence. Put simply, as the reader walks back the world's newly 56 revealed ecology appears more exciting and joyful in its expansive vitality and possibility. This ability to joyfully experience ecological ontology, using IMHBD's ambient poetics to develop "rocking" as a lived phenomenology of the symbiotic real, extends both 'Critical Ambience' and Humankind's projects. For 'Critical Ambience', the fact that the text might refigure the reader's perception of something so vital as ontology is a clear refutation 56 For more on the ontological "vibrancy" of objects see: Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 55 Ibid., p. 188. 54 Morton, Humankind, p. 179. 53 Pullinger and Speakman, 'It Must Have Been Dark by Then', p. 111. of ambient poetics as simply 'passive backgrounds or immersive entertainment.' The 57 attunement of a reader to such a radical ontology is an intensely critical practice, demonstrating the relevance of Dovey and Hayler's discussion of ecology and ambience to future projects engaged with similar concerns. For Humankind, reintroducing the idea that ambient poetics might allow us to 'experience the fact that we [are] embedded in' ecology enables Morton's project of developing a new radical ontology to become more fully realised by smoothly attuning the reader's perception to its nuances. When combined with other 58