Posts

My friend Rune with some great words on dark ecology and VanderMeer

...in Danish, scuse the translation: The film operates here both psychologically and biologically and physically in a form of 'dark ecology', as the ecophilosopher Timothy Morton has called it. Because according to dark ecology, everything is constantly changing, including the subject, it's unwise to try to distinguish between the hidden one on one side and the world out there on the other side. As Morton points out, "we" should not, as in earlier and more traditional ecological purposes, elevate "the natural" (plants, animals, moles and rocks) to a noble design as something pure and unchangeable. Instead, we should completely drop the idea of "the natural" and instead look at the world as one big and always variable size, which is not only in constant motion, but also always is "us" and vice versa.

New Translation of Charbonneau

...into English! Coming out with Bloomsbury. Here's my endorsement: The ecological emergency is so systemic and so vast that the human imagination—the feel of our thinking powers—is frozen like someone afraid of heights, terrified of her capacity to visualize what seems to be a tragedy or a nightmare. One response is to freeze the future, the idea that things could be different, as around the world people consent to fascist-paranoid politics that relieve them of the burden of thinking and visualizing. Christian Roy’s lovely translation of Charbonneau’s masterpiece is like allergy medicine that allows us to un-freeze, and for the sake of all lifeforms on Earth, staying fluid in the struggle is now exactly what William Blake meant by “mental fight.”

Hyperobjects Exhibition in Marfa, Texas starts in two weeks!

Here's what I've written for the guide: Will All Artists Please Come to a White Courtesy Telephone Timothy Morton Art has one foot in the past, and one foot in the future. All the decisions, deliberate and not deliberate, that a host of things made--we could call this host the author or the artist (historical era, economic system—these two are often included, ecosystem not so much quite yet). Then again, just what exactly is this work of art? What is it “saying” (and so on). Such questions trail off into a kind of quietness we might call the future. Threateningly gentle, it haunts the machinations that brought us to wherever we’re calling “here” at the moment. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? (As my old Oxford tutor Terry Eagleton was fond of saying.) At whatever scale we zoom out to, we aren’t in control as humans at all—not even on the ones we inhabit, not in control as much anyway, because the whole point of inhabiting is that it’s unstable, it’s in motion (hint: it has...

I Am Disabled

Mark Fisher was my friend. He was and I am disabled, only on the inside. I scored 96% on the depression test, and the psychiatrist said, “I can’t believe you made it this far,” aka in my life, alive.  The amount of negativity I’m receiving is an indication of how unacceptable mental illness still is. I will never stop speaking up for the importance of taking care of oneself.  The kind of disability we have/had requires pills, not wheelchairs. I am on the maximum dose of a drug called Wellbutrin. The pills have limits. Like everything else. One thing they do is, they make sure you don’t die. I love Mark’s sentences. They’re amazing. I wrote him fan letters about them. We need more amazing sentences.  I yearn for more of Mark’s. What he wrote about Joy Division is utterly unsurpassable. I think about it a lot. 

Antidepressants

Ever so sorry to have written a tweet that is causing upset. I’ve deleted it. You’re welcome to suggest ways I can repair anything I’ve damaged if you wish. It’s an issue that is very close to my heart, and the last time I spoke with Mark it was about all this, and it included an exchange on Twitter where we discussed what had then just been released to the media, namely a report that claimed these sorts of medicine were no better than placebo. One problem for me is, I’m still going through grief processes about Mark myself, and when someone I care about commits suicide I tend to go straight from shock to anger. But this doesn’t make it easy for others to receive my communications about it. I’m very out about my own depression (same intensity level as Mark’s), and am determined to help people know they can get help, in various different ways. The Lancet just published something that confirmed that antidepressants do work much better than placebo, and I think it’s important to talk abou...

New Bio

Just in case--sorry, but I do so much stuff that my bio keeps going out of date! And I just heard an old one that must have been copied and pasted from this site. Here's the official one: Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He has collaborated with Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Olafur Eliasson, Haim Steinbach, Emilija Skarnulyte and Pharrell Williams. He is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectu...

I'm in this Film with Jeff Bridges

By the amazing Susan Kucera.