Words matter. These are the best Timothy Morton Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I grew up in a haunting postindustrial landscape where prehistoric ferns grew among tens of railway tracks surmounted by brilliant arc lights where birds nested and sang in the dead of night, because for them, it was day.
Somewhat selfishly, perhaps, I like to think that the best people sometimes take a few goes to get a job.
Being seen means that your being is held by the other person without comment, without praise or blame or indifference – just with some kind of open care.
We’re all human beings, in the end, despite our differences.
Always say less than you think you need. Inject some space into the conversation.
Ecological thought rejects consumerism at its peril.
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.
‘Do not touch ontologically’ doesn’t mean ‘are separated by empirically measurable hard edges.’
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.
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.
I love David Bohm. I started to get into speculative realism because I started reading his work.
Applying for a job after finishing a Ph.D is about turning yourself inside out. You’ve been involved in the most introverted process you’ve ever done, and now you have to show yourself to the world at large.
When I make music, I often sound better singing as a woman, go figure, so I like to tweak the format and pitch and suchlike of my recorded voice. Sounds better.
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 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 discover in my experiential space evidence for the wrongness of solipsism, and this evidence is called beauty.
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.
Job applications are an aesthetic event. They are performance art. They are not about proving you are smart – well, maybe your writing sample does that, but even then, the main point is to get an interview.
Invoking Nature always measures the distance we have yet to travel to achieve real progress on environmental issues.
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.
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.
I love folding laundry.
One advantage of arguing that causality is aesthetic is that it allows us to consider what we call consciousness alongside what we call things.
I so totally refuse to ‘make an effort to understand’ the people who have become vectors for a fascist spectacular politics.
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.
Fear of nothingness is fear of a certain physicality, a physicality whose phenomena I cannot predictably demarcate from its reality in advance.
It’s easier to be Eric Idle than to be Paul McCartney.
Since appearance can’t be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing, attunement is a living, dynamic relation with another being.
Pollution is everywhere, in that ancient Greek sense of miasma: guilt experienced as abject body fluid, moral pollution defining what kinds of beings count in social space.
After a lifetime of listening to every Floyd album pretty much all the time – they’re etched – ‘Animals’ is the one I can listen to again and again.
Everything is a railway junction where past and future are sliding over one another, not touching.
Bohm’s ‘ontological interpretation’ was so called because of the bad rap the word ‘ontology’ has had in our correlationist age. As a bit of a put-down.
I believe art is a way to attune to what reality is, which is a weird reality.
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.
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.
Reductionism and elimination make one feel clever, but what happens when the meditator drops her fixation on feeling clever?
If you’re applying for jobs, get a suit now, whether or not you get an interview. Spend as much as you can on it without breaking the bank. It will do you some good.
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.
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!
Our ecological emergency demands proactive choices, not reactive sideswipes.
There is no essence, but there is a flux that is more real than any instance of the flux, such as a milk bottle or a tiger.
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.
Before there was Bjork, there was Prince. That’s a very simple encapsulation of my personal pop life.
You wouldn’t believe how many philosophers are afraid of movement.
Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept.
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.
Aesthetic experiences are powerful, to be sure, and probably inescapable, but Nature will not remain effective for very long.
It’s easier to be the art school band than to be the Beatles.
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.
Losing a fantasy is much harder than losing a reality.
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.
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.
I always knew Andy Hageman would publish incredible eco stuff.
I find it beyond stunning that there is a school of thought or two out there that swears we are into solids and that solids are bad and liquids are good.
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.
‘Humankind’ is an attempt to think the human species without Nature and without humanity.
Since when did scientific evidence become a reason to shy away from ecological action just because it wasn’t popular?
Anyone who has trouble imagining causality as magical and uncanny need only consider the existence of children.
OOO objects have all the abjection added back in. They don’t behave like normalized patriarchal subjects at all.
If you’ve read ‘Dark Ecology,’ you’ll know there’s a whole thing about cats in it, more than once.
The present is haunted by the X-present. I call this manifold of present and X-present ‘nowness’: a shifting, haunted region like evaporating mist; a region can’t be tied to a specific timescale.
I’m the absolute worst at getting jobs, ever. I had 100 rejections before I landed one. I kept all the letters in a folder until I realized I could just chuck them away.
Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me?
Beauty doesn’t have to be in accord with prefabricated concepts of ‘pretty.’
Inevitably, ecological awareness has this kind of ’70s flavour to it.
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.
