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" 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. "

Timothy Morton

Fix

Problem

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" Everything is a railway junction where past and future are sliding over one another, not touching. "

" Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept. "

" Since a thing cannot be known directly or totally, one can only attune to it, with greater or lesser degrees of intimacy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" American voting districts are, across a lot of the country, deeply messed up by having been gerrymandered by right-wing politicians. "

" 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. "

Timothy Morton

Human

Garbage

" In my experience, academia is a World War 1 kind of a domain, and I do my best to avoid all that trench warfare. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Ecological thought rejects consumerism at its peril. "

" If you've read 'Dark Ecology,' you'll know there's a whole thing about cats in it, more than once. "

Timothy Morton

Cats

You

" 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. "

" 'Free speech' isn't speech at all if it's being used without listening, attention, or care. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" An adjective, such as 'flimsy,' describes someone's access to a thing, such as 'argument.' But that's just that someone's access. It may be accurate. But it's theirs nevertheless. "

" Humans can no longer ignore nonhumans: they end up haunting the words we use and interrupting everyday talk. "

Timothy Morton

Ignore

Talk

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Always say less than you think you need. Inject some space into the conversation. "

" Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me? "

Timothy Morton

Hosting

Vehicle

" 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! "

" Anyone who has trouble imagining causality as magical and uncanny need only consider the existence of children. "