lightsinthedistance-modernlife

That Was Nice

2013-09-25T16:24:00.000-07:00

A three thousand word essay for Claire Colebrook in a day. The best was a 7000 word essay for New Literary History (hi Rita!) in three hours.

"But I Like It"

2013-09-25T06:30:00.000-07:00

"My own experience confirms this. Here's our profile: healthy family of 3, with good income, living in NY, with both spouses now self-employed. We have been without health insurance for the past 2 years, since the best we could do was $3000/month for a basic plan through Blue Cross. 3000 dollars a month (that was the cheapest non-catastrophic plan, too)! Who could afford that? Anyhow, last week I called up the NY state agency to check prices through the exchanges and was quoted prices of between $400-$650/month, depending on the plan and whether it was Silver or Bronze. I literally couldn't believe it.

Clearly this is tyranny, fascism, socialism, the purest example of dictatorship I have ever witnessed, an affront to everything that is holy and American. But I like it."
--comment on the Obamacare rates on one of my favorite news sites today

Think Tank (PiL)

2013-09-24T06:32:00.000-07:00

I like how the tank becomes military here.

Think Tank

2013-09-24T05:18:00.000-07:00

A think tank is just a fake university run by conservatives or neoliberals to confuse people. Look at this for instance.

The chap spreading the wrong about Obamacare is an “adjunct scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute.

In other words he is supposed to appear a part-time, innocent eager beaver pursuing truth. Whereas his fee for the “research” alone is probably double or triple what an actual adjunct professor would be paid for teaching one class.

Latour on "Progress"

2013-09-23T14:03:00.000-07:00

Continued from the last post: I can't tell you how awkward it was to be pathologized as one of these apocalypse mongers on numerous occasions, perhaps most intensely at U Wisconsin Madison last fall. Especially since like Latour (I say it all the time, in a slightly different register), my belief is that the apocalypse has already occurred.

I was pathologized thus simply for stating a physical fact: at the rate we are going, by 30 years from now we will have emitted five times more gigatons of carbon than is necessary to, ahem, "transform" (I believe I used a coital verb) Earth beyond all recognition.

An arche-fact, if you like, one that doesn't depend on a correlator to make it real.

Bingo, Latour

2013-09-23T13:49:00.000-07:00

Modernizers are extraordinarily good at freeing themselves from the shackles of the archaic, provincial, stuffy, local, territorial past. But when the time comes to designate the new localities, the new territories, the provinces...toward which they are migrating, they content themselves with utopia, with hype, and great movements of the chest...

No wonder they never paid any attention to where they were headed, obsessed as they were to escape from attachment to the old land. Good at detachment, they seem quite naive when the question is how to reattach themselves to a new boat, how to delineate a new nomos...

Funnily enough the more progress-oriented modernizers are, the more they are ready to deny that ecology could even be an issue. The more rabid is their contempt for they call “prophets of doom,” “apocalypse mongers.” If you push them a bit more they will even tell you that all the talk about the end of time, of the inuption of Gaia is nothing but so many schemes to exploit the poor developing countries even more. If they are from the left.

If they are from the right, then it's nothing but a plot to impose Communism on the rich developed nations. It is as if they are saying “Progress minded of all nations and all parties, let's unite in the denial of climatology as our new horizon. We need neither territory nor a soil. There is no limit. Forward! Only reactionaries insist on limits, they don't want to be emancipated, they want to drag us back to the land, to an era of restoration and misery from which we have finally and so successfully migrated.”

--Bruno Latour, Gifford Lecture 5

Hyperobjects Day

2013-09-23T06:35:00.000-07:00

“Hello!

You are receiving this because you are in some way connected with me and my book Hyperobjects, which is due out on September 23.

Hyperobjects are things such as climate and radiation, not to mention Earth itself. Things that massively outscale us, things that are massively distributed in time and space.

Rather than do a book launch--one place, one time, didn't seem appropriate--I decided to call 9.23 Hyperobjects Day.

We will celebrate Hyperobjects Day in a necessarily rolling, phased way, because we are living on a gigantic thing that rotates.

We will celebrate Hyperobjects Day in a contemplative manner.

I wondered what the simplest thing to do might be to acknowledge the looming presence of at least one of our beloved hyperobjects.

On Hyperobjects Day, on the hour of 10am wherever you are, I want you to take your shoes off for one minute.

When you take your shoes off, you notice you are on Earth, for a moment. Two of the familiar “tools” in your world (your shoes) malfunction, as it were. What is under your feet becomes a little bit clear.

No particular thoughts or actions are required apart from the removal of your shoes.

Yours,

Tim Morton”

Why Did It Happen?

2013-09-22T11:03:00.000-07:00

That parallel with Latour is strange. I wrote Hyperobjects in fifteen days in the summer of 2011. Latour gave the lectures in 2012. Presumably he was getting them together in 2011 too. Thinking is sometimes distributed such that you wonder whether there is such a thing as a zeitgeist.

Latour Hyperobjects

2013-09-22T10:58:00.000-07:00

Watching the Gifford lectures in preparation for the American Academy of Religion, I"m struck by how when writing Hyperobjects I was thinking the same thoughts as Latour, a fact that has often been pointed out to me by our mutual editor Lindsay Waters of Harvard.

Several points of contact include our enthusiasm for the term Anthropocene (and damn the humanist hand wringing), our rejection of the concept Nature, and our thinking of what comes next (for Latour it is called Gaia) as like the "only a god can save us now" of Heidegger, in a strange ironic way.

I'll post some excellent lines of his on why Anthropocene is a very good term.

Object-Oriented Architecture

2013-09-21T16:23:00.000-07:00

Oh yes I think so. A growing number of architects are into it. These were suggested to me as prototypical examples of it, and I'm thinking about it right now. Very beautiful essay on Harman and possibilities for OO architecture. More on that soon.. Judging by how many architecture and design journals and conferences I've worked for of late (and also Graham), I think yes of course.

And it's crystal clear that to be an architect you need to think about relationships with humans and nonhumans such as stones, sand, skid steer loaders and people heaving bags of groceries. And futurality.

"I'm sorry I have to take this"

2013-09-21T08:31:00.000-07:00

This piece by Ian Bogost is just excellent.

Tweet Proof

2013-09-21T08:19:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey Cohen was sending off some proofs today. I had forgotten to read them. So I thought the most efficient way to get them to him would be to tweet them--which turned out correct.

Slowmo Nonhuman Time

2013-09-20T14:54:00.000-07:00

If you are a small animal, time passes slowly--strangely like in Spiderman... Thanks Cliff Gerrish...

Julian Yates on ANT: "Agent Orange"

2013-09-20T14:47:00.000-07:00

Trying to take into account all the possible entities in an action such as making bacon and eggs, a blog post or a journal article. Actants, a neutral term for these.

This is Professor Yates's description of actor network theory, in an undergraduate masterclass he's doing here today. I'm the professor of record.

He has placed an orange on the table and he is asking the students what they have made recently.

A fact of making things is that you unmake them. Yates reads from Pandora's Hope. "Whenever we make something we are not in command--we are slightly overtaken by the action...constructivism uses a vocabulary of mastery that no construction worker would agree to."

This is all in the line of talking about poetry as poiesis.

Politeness and welcoming is required.

Making things is messy and you need a messy description of it to maximize the number of things.

There are cascades of irreversible events.

You have to make better and more inclusive lists. Yates does this with reference to John Gerard's memoir. This includes oranges and lemons (as the warder likes oranges and so forth; and Gerard's discussion of lemon juice).

Archived events have missing links. You need to keep track of them.

Time and Space Are Emergent

2013-09-20T04:56:00.000-07:00

A rather wonderful mathematical object drastically simplifies calculating the scattering of quanta. And suggests that spacetime emerges from things, as I've been banging on about for ages now.

Thank you Cliff, once more!

Subtropically

2013-09-20T04:53:00.000-07:00

Dawn happens here somewhat later than it would in northern climes such as England. It's quite noticeable, having been in the UK for nine weeks. It's still dark out here as I type this at 6:50am. In London by now it's pretty bright.

Dawn is also a lot faster. In the next fifteen minutes, it will be day. It reminds me very much, and in a good way, of the time I spent in the Amazon in this biology research station quite a long time ago.

Sometimes it gets so humid that the air just seems to precipitate rain about three inches above your head. It doesn't fall out of the sky so much as begin to surround you.

Alphonso Lingis writes somewhere about how you get directives from the “levels” emitted by things--I call them zones. You can feel for instance that the Antarctic is your real home, as strange as that may sound to someone else. It feels like that in this subtropical place without doubt.

Koch Brothers, Here Is An Even More Frightening Obamacare Ad

2013-09-19T15:30:00.000-07:00

"Imagine not having any health insurance at all."

300+

2013-09-19T13:17:00.000-07:00

More than 300 scholarly citations now for Ecology without Nature. I was wondering when that might happen. I'm not sure whether it's a lot. But it is a bit more than the other ones. I think perhaps because there is a lot of art, music and literature analysis in it. And it topples over a pile of dominoes that needed to be toppled over. And it's quite historicized, as they say.

Art/France/Ecological Thought

2013-09-19T09:13:00.000-07:00

In Bourges.

Ghost Nature is a group exhibition based around the strangeness of the natural world. As contemporary philosopher, Timothy Morton posits in his book, The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010) ‘nature qua nature’ no longer exists as an “over there” place. Humankind is wholly integrated within its “mesh” and as such, the Romantic desire to commune with a landscape beyond the scope of humanity is impossible. Nevertheless there remains an inherited desire to so. It is a glitch. The tickle of a phantom limb. A desire forever unfulfilled but nonetheless maddening. Artists Sebastian Alvarez, Irina Botea, Marcus Coates, Every House Has A Door, Milan Metthey, Rebecca Mir, Katie Patterson, Tessa Siddle, Agnes Meyer-Brandis and collaborative duo, AOo will install, perform and screen works that explore the dynamic between human and non-human spheres. As with Katie Patterson’s Earth-Moon-Earth or Rebecca Mir’s Long Distance Relationship with the Ocean: Rock + Two Letters, these works sometimes expose idiosyncratic strategies to compensate for, and overcome interspecies bounds — as with AOO’s horse-human blood transfusion, Que Cheval Vie en Moi, or Agnes Meyer-Brandi’s Moon Geese Experiments, where she has been training geese to adapt to moon-like conditions. Instead of challenging the environment of an institution by way of socially engaged practice, Ghost Nature exposes a more general and omnicient environment, hoping through discrete works of art, to highlight longstanding hierarchical expectations that have thus far shaped the western world. As part of this exhibition, in collaboration with La Box and the Paris-based group, Laboratoire du Contemporain, I propose an auxiliary mini-symposium, that would integrate the worlds of contemporary art and philosophical discourse by durectly addressing themes present in the exhibit by way of lectures, workshops and performances.Participants include performance artists Sebastian Alvarez, Ever house has a door, Devin King and Tessa Siddle; with lectures presented by JoЛo FlorРncio, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Eileen Myles, Laurie Palmer, and Lily Robert-Foley. The purpose of this mini-symposium is to invite students, artists, academics and the general public to discuss the remarkable ecological times we live in, using a series of curated talks, art works and philosophical examples thatwith the hopes of transforming the way humankind conceives of itself in the natural world. It would of great interest to invite local speakers and guest artists in addition.

More Hyperobject:Homeland

2013-09-18T06:31:00.000-07:00

As it is a hologram it changes depending where you are. Like a hyperobject!

Hyperobject:Homeland Where?

2013-09-18T06:29:00.000-07:00

It is in New York. Paula Dawson. I wrote a brief piece for her show called “Paula Dawson, Hyperobject Detector,” which you will find it you go there...

Holograms!!

Book Launches

2013-09-18T06:23:00.000-07:00

I have never understood them, ever. It seems particularly absurd in the case of Hyperobjects, considering how they are “everywhere” all at once. I reckon I'm happier to do launchy type things here on this blog. But the idea of wasting everyone's time in some smallish bookstore--the schlepping to it (it will inevitably be in New York, which is also disconcerting for me) and so on included--just fails to ignite anything within me whatsoever.

So just go ahead and pre-order it! It will be “everywhere” fairly shortly and right now it appears to be squaring off against Barthes, Horkheimer and Adorno, and a pop critical thinking manual. Maybe that quite adequately describes the scope of the book's intellectual structure :)

And if you're in New York go to see Paula Dawon's Hyperobject:Homeland at Interference:Coexistence.

Essays Coming

2013-09-17T13:27:00.000-07:00

The piece on plexiglass chairs for Marina Zurkow's Petroleum Manga project is done and nearly out.

My essay for Olafur Eliasson is being revised (hi Olafur! Thanks for the kindnesses!)

The essay on Irigaray and ecology for The Journal for the British Society for Phenomenology is still happening. It is called “This Biosphere Which Is Not One.”

I wrote “Paula Dawson, Hyperobject Detector” for an exhibition of her work called Hyperobject: Homeland.

I'm writing what is now called “Colored Space” on the elements and the elemental for Jeffrey Cohen.

I'm writing “Derrida and Ecology” for Claire Colebrook.

I've written “Ecology” for Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger.

The International Social Studies issue on ecology is now happening as is my essay in it called “From Modernity to the Anthropocene.”

I'm revising “She Stood in Tears amidst the Alien Corn” for diacritics.

I've done my essay “Buddhist Objects” for Bryant and Bogost.

I'm now writing “Specters of Ecology” for a big essay collection (Fordham) that also promises to be major, probably called The New Ecological Paradigm.

Ashgate (TBA) is publishing “She Walks in Beauty like the Night in Which All Cows are Black.”

Romanticism is publishing “Romantic Ecology Revisited.”

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature will publish an essay called “The Future of Nature.”

“Beauty Is Death” will appear in The Persistence of Beauty ed. Michael O'Neill and Sarah Wootton.

Get Your Lovely Hyperobjects Here!

2013-09-17T10:05:00.000-07:00

Pollution, global warming, radiation--go on, you know you want to. Number 3 in Criticism!

Julian Yates on ANT at Rice

2013-09-17T09:19:00.000-07:00

Yes that's right, this Friday.