Timothy Morton
In the U.K. - correct me if I'm wrong - there is a legal definition of 'not being in possession of yourself' aka 'not being a person.' That's the fun thing: someone such as a lawyer needs to define, using some empirical signal, something supposedly transcendental like 'person,' something lawyers argue and argue about regarding, say, chimps in zoos.Collection: Legal
Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept.Collection: Experience
Nature was developed to resist the onslaughts of capitalism, but it's really not a very good defense - rather like resisting a steamroller with a Christmas tree ornament.Collection: Christmas
Invoking Nature always measures the distance we have yet to travel to achieve real progress on environmental issues.Collection: Environmental
My mates Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe have put together thirty one episodes of a really really nice podcast at Rice as part of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The 'Cultures of Energy Podcast' is so good!Collection: Environmental
It's very important that we keep our imagination, which is our capacity to open the future, awake at a time at which the urge to collapse into the fetal position is high.Collection: Imagination
Does anyone recall hippies designing things for Generation X? Does anyone recall the elegance of that? How design was about making things simpler?Collection: Design
We're all human beings, in the end, despite our differences.
If you have suffered from trauma, one of the most healing things that can happen to you is being seen. Being seen doesn't have to mean that someone actually lays their eyes on you, although that certainly helps.
Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me?
The waste products in Earth's crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense. One's garbage doesn't go 'away' - it just goes somewhere else.
Ecological thought rejects consumerism at its peril.
Nothingness is not nothing at all, so it is physical, but not in the sense of constant presence. Nothingness is disturbing. It is there in a mind-independent sense; it is part of what is given.
Everything is a railway junction where past and future are sliding over one another, not touching.
A weird thing is a strange loop, what some of us call 'an object.' Thus it is looked down on by the constructivist spokespeople of anti-art, which is also an anti-products movement - the dominant mode of high art since the inception of the Anthropocene.
The belief that 'animals' are superior or inferior to humans because they live in an eternal now is untrue, because no being lives in a now.
I love David Bohm. I started to get into speculative realism because I started reading his work.
Losing a fantasy is much harder than losing a reality.
Since when did scientific evidence become a reason to shy away from ecological action just because it wasn't popular?
I believe art is a way to attune to what reality is, which is a weird reality.
If you've read 'Dark Ecology,' you'll know there's a whole thing about cats in it, more than once.
When you make or study art, you are not exploring some kind of candy on the surface of a machine. You are making or studying causality.
In the end, a lifeform is always a hybrid, a being endowed with some X-power such as being able to breathe for a few seconds out of water. That's how evolution works. Spectrally. We are all mermaids.
Anyone who has trouble imagining causality as magical and uncanny need only consider the existence of children.
Unfortunately, there are some ecological phenomenological chemicals within consumerism.
'Free speech' isn't speech at all if it's being used without listening, attention, or care.
Aesthetic experiences are powerful, to be sure, and probably inescapable, but Nature will not remain effective for very long.
Psychologism holds that logical assertions are percolations of brains. Thus logic is a set of rules for how healthy brains operate. Aside from the infinite regress of a brain determining whether a brain is healthy, we have the infinite regress of the idea 'All concepts are brain percolations' being itself a brain percolation, on its own terms.
Humans can no longer ignore nonhumans: they end up haunting the words we use and interrupting everyday talk.
Since appearance can't be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing, attunement is a living, dynamic relation with another being.
You wouldn't believe how many philosophers are afraid of movement.
Inevitably, ecological awareness has this kind of '70s flavour to it.
I like to think of myself as the corniest, most awful thing you could possibly imagine.
I can get quite well known, and then I can unleash this kind of anarchist-hippie thing that I've been holding like a very precious liquid, carefully, without spilling any, for years and years and years. And now I'm going to pour it everywhere.
It truly seems to me that there is some kind of shift happening towards ecological awareness - not just in terms of PR for the science.
An artist attunes to what things are, which means sort of listening to the future, which is just how things are - I think time is a sort of liquid that pours out of hatpins, underground trains, salt crystals. So a work of art is also listening to itself, because what it is never quite coincides with how it appears, too.
The Severing is a catastrophe: an event that does not take place 'at' a certain 'point' in linear time, but a wave that ripples out in many dimensions, and in whose wake we are caught.
One advantage of arguing that causality is aesthetic is that it allows us to consider what we call consciousness alongside what we call things.
The trouble with ecological invocations of Nature is that they're like calling for a medieval tool, perhaps a portcullis or an arrow slit, to fix a modern problem.
I'm not unhappy with the idea of appealing to people's self-interest if that's what makes them understand something about the non-human world.
Trivially speaking, ecological awareness means realising that beings are interconnected in some way, but then we have to figure out what this interconnection actually means.
Symbiosis can fail in various different ways: if there's too much stomach bacteria in my stomach, I might have some problems. If there's too little, I might have some problems. There's a sort of dynamic system there.
We like to think, in our anthropocentric way, that irony means that you transcended something, but actually, what it means is that you've realised that you're stuck in something, and you have this kind of uncanny awareness of that, and there's not much you can do about that feeling of stuckness.
Our ecological emergency demands proactive choices, not reactive sideswipes.
The noises Russia makes on the world stage are deeply misogynist, homophobic and racist.
American voting districts are, across a lot of the country, deeply messed up by having been gerrymandered by right-wing politicians.
We intellectuals are not stupid: we know the phenomenology of guilt is a bad photocopy of the phenomenology of thought, so it's much cheaper to press that button.
Unfortunately, of course, guilt is an artifact of agricultural-age religion and is designed specifically to prevent humans from thinking and operating on a collective level.
When you watch one person on stage trying to surmount their fate only in that very action to embody it, it's called a tragedy. When you see a lot of people doing it on stage, it's called 'Fawlty Towers.'
You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.