We're all human beings, in the end, despite our differences.
Timothy Morton
Everything is a railway junction where past and future are sliding over one another, not touching.
Our ecological emergency demands proactive choices, not reactive sideswipes.
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.
If you've read 'Dark Ecology,' you'll know there's a whole thing about cats in it, more than once.
Losing a fantasy is much harder than losing a reality.
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.
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.
Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me?
Since appearance can't be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing, attunement is a living, dynamic relation with another being.
It's easier to be the art school band than to be the Beatles.
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.
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.
When you look for the environment, you find things that are in it: a hammer, a smartphone, some rusty nails, a shed, a spider, some grass, a tree. So there is a big difference between environmentality and Nature. Nature is definitely something you can point to: it is 'over yonder' in the mountains, in my DNA, under the pavement.
One advantage of arguing that causality is aesthetic is that it allows us to consider what we call consciousness alongside what we call things.
Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept.
The ideal job letter starts with a brilliant light. Then we realize that this brilliant light is actually sunlight, shafts of it, pouring through trees onto a thick bed of pine needles. Soft dusty resin floats in the sun shafts, invitingly. The smell of pine and sap rises from the forest floor. A twig snaps underfoot.
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.
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.
Since when did scientific evidence become a reason to shy away from ecological action just because it wasn't popular?
The Left is correctly wary of talk about nonhumans in the key of Nature and its spiritual partner, humanity.
In many cases, contemporary materialisms map uncannily well onto Pre-Socratic ideas such that instead of Anaximander, we have the physicist David Bohm and his idea of an underlying 'implicate order' that transcends time and space.
An environment is precisely something one is unable to point to yet is strangely there nonetheless.
In my experience, academia is a World War 1 kind of a domain, and I do my best to avoid all that trench warfare.
I like being irritating.
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.
A job letter, an interview - even a writing sample - have far less to do with intellect and far more to do with aesthetics than you think.
It's easier to be Eric Idle than to be Paul McCartney.
Somewhat selfishly, perhaps, I like to think that the best people sometimes take a few goes to get a job.
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.
Humans can no longer ignore nonhumans: they end up haunting the words we use and interrupting everyday talk.
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.
Ecological thought rejects consumerism at its peril.
Does anyone recall hippies designing things for Generation X? Does anyone recall the elegance of that? How design was about making things simpler?
OOO objects have all the abjection added back in. They don't behave like normalized patriarchal subjects at all.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I love David Bohm. I started to get into speculative realism because I started reading his work.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I believe art is a way to attune to what reality is, which is a weird reality.
