“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, February 28, 2014

Another Fun Fact

45% percent of all the books I've ever sold on amazon USA have been copies of Hyperobjects.

Naturally this is not a lot in terms of actual units, by Salman Rushdie standards!

Hyperobjects in The Guardian

It turns out that the SCMP was affiliated with this.

Monday, February 24, 2014

Who Will Read the Hyperobjects Audiobook?

The anarchist mayor of Reykjavik has requested an audiobook of Hyperobjects. But who will read it?

Let me know your preferences by commenting on this post.

The choices so far are:

Darth Vader
Galadriel
Agent Smith
Gru
Lady Mary Josephine Crawley
Stella (Over the Hedge)

PS: This is really happening. Except for some of it.


An Interview on Hyperobjects

...from New Books in Critical Theory. Thank you Professor Nappi for the very kind words and for the searching and detailed interview.

Laruellgorithm

1. All philosophers are hamstrung by decisional procedures. 
2. (1) is not a decisional procedure.

Example: 
1. Derrida is typically Jewish. 
2. “Derrida is typically Jewish” is not a decisional procedure. 

Or: 
1. I, Laruelle, exempt myself from my critique of everyone else.
2. (1) is not a decisional procedure.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Candy Crush Ecology

The current agrilogistical setup (current for 10 000 years) is Candy Crush on a global scale.

Discuss
(While I put it in Dark Ecology)



Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Talking Today

And I don't even have to travel! And I'm being paid! (Talking at the Provost's lecture series to the faculty.)

I love this job! Really. It's the first time I've felt home in all my 25 years of teaching.

Stand by for information on future talks (Irvine, UCSB, Switzerland, Germany, Houston).

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Really Southern Accreditation Board?

You seriously want me to prove that I have a Ph.D. (along with all of us poor saps on faculties here)?

Good luck getting my transcript from Oxford! They don't exist!

Oh I'm sorry, you *don't* want to influence non-scholars?

For instance, I've been told off twice for liveblogging smart helpful intelligent people. Just taking dictation without comment.

Let Nicholas Kristof explain why that is rather a bad idea.

Especially because we're in the middle of an ecological emergency here!

Art in the Anthrpocene Era

In New York and The Hague, with some references to my stuff.

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Energy Humanities

By my mate Dominic Boyer and my editor Imre Szeman.


Graham Harman: The Concept of Infrastructure

Hosted by Dominic Boyer, introduced by me. Audience over 100 which is extraordinary for the middle of Houston. Curators from Menil. Undergrads. Etc. etc.




Graham Harman is a human being, founder of a philosophical movement, an assemblage of cells, someone who lives in Ankara, a cosmonaut beyond anthropocentrism, a jolly good friend, a once Associate Provost, a collection of bones, a fan of Picasso, a champion sentence writer, a continental guy who knows his analytic from his left elbow, this person actually here right now, Distinguished University Professor, erstwhile sportswriter, a sound of laughter, chief architect of object-oriented ontology, editor of series at Edinburgh and Ann Arbor, troll hammer, two eyes, two irises within two eyes, employee of the American University in Cairo, The Radial contraction folds of Schwalbe within a host of tiny fibrovascular tissues within two irises within two eyes, someone who refers to Grand Moff Tarkin in scholarly prose, vegetarian since a nipper, guy who within 24 hours of reading my book on causality wrote me eight pages of notes about every aspect of it, chap who walked with me up to Paul Klee's Fish Magic and was entranced, a sort of joyful accurate diamond drill with a taste for comedy, this lad from Iowa, a host of books from numerous presses that seem to fly forth like golden Frisbees of righteous love of wisdom to the eager hands of his readers, eater of a pizza slice with me in a an uptown New York dive, shower-up everywhere on Earth, fastest blogger in the West.

But that's just the way this entity called Graham appears and relates to all kinds of other things that are him and aren't him. With such an encomiastic list, I haven't begun to exhaust his Grahamness yet. And that's because…oh well, he should explain. Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Graham Harman, “The Concept of Infrastructure.”

Friday, February 14, 2014

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Thank You DJ Spooky

Paul Miller can teach my book and I've taught his.

But I can beat match about as well as Shaggy and Scooby can remain calm.



"Happy" Dön Season: Good Luck!

This is the time (before March 2) when the karmic **** from last year still stuck at the bottom of the porridge bowl of reality really starts to rise up and affect you. You will be aggravated. Accidents will happen. Miscommunications will fly about.

Saturday, February 8, 2014

My Talk to the Rice Faculty in mid-Feb

The Humanities in the Age of Ecological Emergency
Timothy Morton


Humans created the Anthropocene, with its global warming. Not jellyfish. Not fungi. Not coral reefs.
The Humanities know a thing or two about humans.
It is imperative therefore that the Humanities be in the mix of thinking that addresses the Anthropocene. Not as a decorative adjunct to science, but alongside it, fueling it, thinking it, analyzing and critiquing it.

This talk is about that.

Modern Manners 2

“As an example of the below, see the Twittersphere and other online fora: form instant opinions, quick as you can. Go!”

Modern Manners

“If in doubt, clamp down hard with superego shame, while indulging every impulse.”

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Blood Wedding

Wow the lp just showed up!





Ecological Awareness 101 (MP3)

Thank you thank you thank you Chris Schaberg. This talk actually is Dark Ecology at about a third of its length.

Here is his very very nice intro. Sorry I only switched on the recorder a moment in.

Books are all different. Wouldn't it be awful if they had to follow some format that was the same every time? So for whatever reason, this is the shape of it.

A “slim volume” lol.

My idea is to put together an accompanying website (thank you Rice in advance!) that showcases the music about dark ecology that many people have been doing for about two years (hey Blood Wedding and Mills College extraordinary people!). There was a lot of visual art in Hyperobjects. For some reason this is all about music.


Buddhaphobia Will Be Published by Chicago

Just got the confirmation yesterday. Brilliant! Some of you were wondering what was going on with it.

Of course one needs to respond to two very nice reader's reports. So I hope I'm not jumping the gun here, but Alan Thomas the Chicago editor is keen on making it work.

I love responding to reports. If you can read them right, even negative reports are workable. You have to swallow and be a bit humble and realize that scholarship is all about seeing what people can't see about their style and about what they're saying. There is an enlightened aspect to working with them.

But in this case--which is excellent as this is quite controversial stuff--it all worked out just right.

Alan came up with that idea while chatting with me last year. He has this series, Trios, in which three people discuss something, in long-essay format, rather than just squawking their individual squawks like parrots in a tree, I mean essay collection. It's a really good idea, isn't it?

I got together with two other scholars of Buddhism, Marcus Boon and Eric Cazdyn, and we decided it really would be good to pool all our stuff together into a real conversation rather than a collection of essays.

I figured out, also, that what I had wasn't a book, it was a very long essay. It's a bit technical but there is a sharp difference between an essay and a book. Now it feels right. Trust me I've done lots of both.

It's not about length. For instance, Dark Ecology will be shorter than this. But for sure it's a book, not an essay.

The book is called Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism and Critical Theory.

We have all exchanged hilarious emails called things like “Here Is Nothing” and “Comments on Nothing” for about a year. “Is Nothing Ready?” We put it together while I was talking at UC Davis last year.

So I've written this roughly 30 000 word thing (which is about as long as Cary Wolfe's new book, and longer than Dark Ecology will be--stand by for more on that), which says almost everything I've wanted to say. It's called “Buddhaphobia: Nothingness and the Fear of Things.”

Knowing how these things go I bet it will be out early next year.

This has been kind of a long process. So many other things to do, and the argument needed to be tuned just right. You can see posts on it going back to November 2010 here.


Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Mediation Is

...intimacy (Trungpa Rinpoche). Everyone was expecting him to say space or whatever.
Right on!

Hyperobjects Ale

Brian Sullivan is a terrific librarian and understander of algorithmical things. He is also a terrific brewer and intuitively made Hyperobjects Ale very malty. Which I really like in this land of over-hoppy things.

And...It's Hypoobjects Ale!


At Loyola

In front of my requested “cute ouroboros” by Ian Bogost.


Interview

With NOLAVie. Thank you Nathan Martin!

And All Right Thinking People Left or Right Insisted on No Attack

Why was that again?

Monday, February 3, 2014

Mavericks

Please tell me this isn't happening.

Please tell me Apple isn't going back to its early 90s post-Jobs form. Now that Jobs is definitively post.

Before you tell me that, can you tell me why I have two folders called Hotmail in Mail?

Why I can't read half the PDFs I have?

Why the autofill function in Word is now just a bunch of symbols?

Why Filemaker Pro took five minutes to load?

And on and on and on and on.

Subtle Body

1. When you mention the subtle body, pretty much everyone in the West who is an intellectual freaks out in various different ways. Look at what happened to Irigaray when she started talking about it.

2. I only publish comments where you are brave enough to put your actual name.