“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


Monday, December 25, 2017

Fuck TFW

TFW you realize that using the second person singular to advertise an unsharable experience has turned you into a PR person for a commodity called yourself that no one can buy, because you're a luxury commodity.

A Thousand and One Citations of The Ecological Thought

...it took a little while, and I want people to read it a lot, because it's the philosophical groundwork for Ecology without Nature. I wrote it in a couple of months in London in 2008. I wrote a three page version and just kept adding sentences!

Gary Snyder read it and it's why he was the first person to call one of my books philosophy.

Friday, December 22, 2017

Pre-Order My Book Being Ecological

MIT are distributing it in the USA. It's being published by Penguin. Here's the UK version.

Laurie Anderson and I are talking about doing some stuff connected to it. What an honor it is to have been sought out by her intellect and brilliance. Stay tuned!

Thursday, December 21, 2017

Divide and Conquer

"Facebook’s response to criticism of its political advertising standards has been more robust. During the 2016 presidential election, the company was complicit in what the Trump campaign acknowledged was a massive “voter suppression” effort. Trump’s digital team spent more than $70 million on Facebook advertising, churning out hundreds of thousands of microtargeted “dark” ads, which appeared only on the timelines of the target audience and did not include disclosures that they were paid for by the campaign. A hefty portion of those adstargeted voters from major Democratic demographics with negative messages about Hillary Clinton and was intended to dissuade them from going to the polls. Facebook employees embedded with the Trump teamaided this effort, helping with targeting and ensuring the ads were approved through an automated system. " --Media Matters

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Morton in Japanese

Here's a list of things of mine that have been published in Japanese. Ecology without Nature is coming in spring 2018 sometime.

“Kankyo shugi” Gendai shiso, trans. Midori Ogawa, vol. 43 no 1, 112-129, January 2015.(= “Environmentalism,” in Nicholas Roe, ed., Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford UP, 2005)

“Kuia ecoloty” Gendai shiso, trans. Masatake Shinohara, vol. 43 no. 10, 64-75, June 2015. (= “Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125.2 (March 2010), 1-19.)

“Namida ni kure, Ikokuno hatanaka ni tatitukushita” Gendai shiso, trans. Midori Ogawa and Masatake Shinohara, Gendai Shiso, vol 43. no. 13, 144-167, September, 2015. (= “She Stood in Tears Amid the Alien Corn: Thinking Through Agrilogistics,” diacritics 41.3 (2014), 90-113.)

My brilliant translator, Masatake Shinohara, writes: Gendai shiso is the leading Japanese journal of contemporary thought. We have learned philosophies of thinkers  such as Deleuze, Derrida, Heidegger from this journal.

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Here's an Interview

...for Springerin, a German magazine (this is a translation). I think it's nice...

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

All My 2017 Essays

Jeez, there are 26 of them! 

1.     “The Love of Wisdom” The Philosophical Salon, December 10.
2.     “Spectral Life: The Uncanny Valley Is in Fact a Gigantic Plain, Stretching as Far as the Eye Can See in Every Direction,” in Jami Weinstein and Claire Colebrook, eds., Posthumous Life: Theorizing Beyond the Posthuman (New York: Columbia, 2017), 271–293.
3.     “En introduktion til ideen om ‘hyperobjecter’,” in Maya Byskov, Sissel Thastum and Line Thastum, eds., Vi Kan Bo Her Mens Viventer: Stemmer I den antropocene tid (We Can Stay Here While We Wait: Voices in the Anthropocene) (Aarhus: The Independent AIR, 2017), 42—51.
4.     “Solidarity and the Symbiotic Real,” in Gediminas Urbonas, ed., Public Space? Lost and Found (Cambridge: MIT, 2017), 117–118.
5.     “Down Beneath the Horror It’s Quiet and I Can Hear Myself Think,” in Olafur Eliasson, ed., Open House: Take Your Time, vol. 7 (Berlin: Studio Olafur Eliassosn, 2017), 365–369.
6.     “The Party Cools of Stoan,” in Martin Clark, ed., I Aint the Noing Uv It Im Onle the Showing Uv It (Bergen Kunsthall, 2017), 147–154.
7.     “A New Holism,” in Daniela Zyman and Eva Ebersberger, Olafur Eliasson Green Light: An Artistic Workshop (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017), 44–51.
8.     “Dark Ecology: Interview with Timothy Morton,” Springerin 4 (2017), 16–20.
9.     “Specters of Ecology,” in Eric Hörl with James Burton, General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 303–321.
10.  “Charisma and Causality,” in Matthew Post, ed., A Rock that Keeps Tigers Away (Kunstverein München, 2017), 13–23.
11.  “And You May Find Yourself Living in an Age of Mass Extinction,” in Kari Conte, ed., Aqueous Earth (ISCP, 2017), 33–45.
12.  “Attune,” in Jeffrey Cohen and Lowell Duckert, eds., Veer Ecology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 151–167.
13.  “Spectral Depth,” Worldviews 21:3 (October, 2017).
14.  “Queer Green Sex Toys,” in Whitney Bauman, ed., Meaningful Flesh (Punktum, 2017).
15.  “Subscendence,” e-flux journal 85 (October, 2017).
16.  “And You May Find Yourself Living in an Age of Mass Extinction,” Anthropology of Consciousness 28:2 (September, 2017).
17.  “Amar las cosas implica permitir que sean raras,” interview, La Vanguardia (Barcelona), April 25.
18.  “Why Ecological Awareness Is Loopy,” in Solveig Nitzke and Nicolas Pethes, eds., Imagining Earth: Concepts of Wholeness in Cultural Constructions of Our Home Planet (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2017), 91–111.
19.  “Always Arranged but Never Complete,” sleeve notes for Caoimhín Breathnach, The Golden Cassette (Aisteach, 2017).
20.  “Groundbreaking Scholar Timothy Morton Wants Philosophers to Face Their ‘Buddhaphobia’,” interview with Sam Littlefair, Lion’s Roar, August 29.
21.  “Time to Press the Space Bar: On Sarah Wood, Without Mastery,” Oxford Literary Review 39:1 (2017), 135–145.
22.  “A Quake in Being,” in Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer, eds., Energy Humanities: An Anthology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 357–373.
23.  “X-Time,” Preface, Heitham Al-Sayed, In the Droom (Paris: Onslaught, 2017), 9–13.
24.  “Earworms,” Soundscape 15:1 (Fall/Winter 2016), 9–14.
25.  “Spectral Causality,” in Allora and Calzadilla, Puerto Rican Light (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2017), 127–132.

26.  “Ecology,” in Imre Szeman Jennifer Wenzel and Patricia Yaeger, eds., Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (New York: Fordham, 2017), 117–119.

Friday, December 8, 2017

Stop with the TFW already

That feeling when you realize that the trope everyone now uses transmutes uniqueness into typicality, thus precisely embodying the current state of being what remains of a person despite your ostensible left wing beliefs.

Personalized alienation.

Thursday, December 7, 2017

Jeff VanderMeer says lovely things about Humankind

Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People by Timothy Morton (Verso Books) – Considered by many to be among the top philosophers in the world, especially among those tackling issues related to human effects on our environment, Morton herein provides an important, spirited, and sometimes frenetic analysis of the foundational assumptions of Marxism and other -isms with regard to nature and culture (whilst also wanting to redefine those terms). Morton makes a compelling case for how our existing ideologies must adapt or change radically to repatriate ourselves with a world in which we are entangled physically but which we have convinced ourselves we are estranged from, or stand apart from, in our minds. If that sounds wordy, it’s because this is a complex topic and Morton is better than I am at expressing complex concepts in ways that are useful to a layperson.--The Millions

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Israel

According to hardcore fundamentalists here in the USA, the return of Jews to Israel will trigger the apocalypse. Then, if they don't convert to Christianity, they will be slaughtered--by Jesus.

Discuss.

Saturday, December 2, 2017

Yes, Quite Simply

I don't know about you but I'm gutted ever day that Clinton, who won the popular vote and for whom Houstonians voted I think 5-1, is not my president. The intensity (good) and staying power (hooray) of the current focus on sexual assault by powerful men is an incredibly salutary result, I'm sure, of the incredible stuff that happened last year. I've been waiting for something like that to happen since I was old enough to understand what misogyny was in a vivid way (which would be about the age of seven), and in general as the child of a strongly feminist mum.

The day I realized I really couldn't be friends with David, was the day he asked, in bookstore of our beloved Tate Gallery, "Why are there no women artists?" I knew it couldn't possibly be true and that the utterance was doing more kinds of work than just being an innocent question, but I had no language to articulate those thoughts yet, so I was only able to say "David, that can't be right." Which didn't deter him at all. I was super glad to get to university and be given the language (thanks Kate Flint!!!) to spell that out better.

The pincer movement whereby people opposed to Trump were set against one another (whether by Russia or internal whatever or some combination) was exquisitely painful, given how I like to think about politics.

The noises Russia makes on the world stage are deeply misogynist, homophobic and racist. I bet they (metonymy for the official Russian look) hated the idea of a black president. Let alone a woman one. Let alone ones who had been endeavoring to keep them in check. You don't have to be specially or secretly in cahoots with such a force if you too are sporting these attitudes. You just like it when you see your view reproduced.

Case in point: I was hassled for several months by a tweep who called themselves putin_cyber_agent. Who cares if they were or were not Russian, or whether or not there were an American Trump or Sanders supporter, or whoever. The name (designed to call the bluff of the reader, like shoplifting in plain sight) is enough for me. Along with what they said.

I tolerated them during the election, thinking that at least I was wasting a tiny bit of their time. After the debacle, the day I blocked them was the day (right after the election) they started stirring it once again with the Sanders supporters, saying Trump had won because of people like me.

No. He won because of men like this:
A pervasive theme of all of these men’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton was that she was dishonest and unlikable. These recent harassment allegations suggest that perhaps the problem wasn’t that Mrs. Clinton was untruthful or inherently hard to connect with, but that these particular men hold deep biases against women who seek power instead of sticking to acquiescent sex-object status.--New York Times
American voting districts are, across a lot of the country, deeply messed up by having been gerrymandered by right wing politicians. Just enough white men and women had to be convinced not to vote for Clinton (remember, she won the popular vote by the biggest margin ever). It worked. Who cares whether the forces were conscious or unconscious or both? (Except for the fact that we would like to have the current administration destroyed by the Mueller investigation.) We know what the forces are. The forces are misyogyny.

You're never, ever going to persuade me that the result was a good idea, for whatever reason. This is going to suck for me for the rest of my life.