Timothy Morton

Philosopher

1968-06-19

Quotes by Timothy Morton

• 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.

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• 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.

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• I love David Bohm. I started to get into speculative realism because I started reading his work.

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• When you look for the environment, you find things that are in it: a hammer, a smartphone, some rusty nails, a shed, a spider, some grass, a tree. So there is a big difference between environmentality and Nature. Nature is definitely something you can point to: it is 'over yonder' in the mountains, in my DNA, under the pavement.

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• 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!

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• Everything is a railway junction where past and future are sliding over one another, not touching.

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• In the U.K. - correct me if I'm wrong - there is a legal definition of 'not being in possession of yourself' aka 'not being a person.' That's the fun thing: someone such as a lawyer needs to define, using some empirical signal, something supposedly transcendental like 'person,' something lawyers argue and argue about regarding, say, chimps in zoos.

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• In my experience, academia is a World War 1 kind of a domain, and I do my best to avoid all that trench warfare.

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• 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.

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• The ideal job letter starts with a brilliant light. Then we realize that this brilliant light is actually sunlight, shafts of it, pouring through trees onto a thick bed of pine needles. Soft dusty resin floats in the sun shafts, invitingly. The smell of pine and sap rises from the forest floor. A twig snaps underfoot.

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• 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.

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• The belief that 'animals' are superior or inferior to humans because they live in an eternal now is untrue, because no being lives in a now.

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• A weird thing is a strange loop, what some of us call 'an object.' Thus it is looked down on by the constructivist spokespeople of anti-art, which is also an anti-products movement - the dominant mode of high art since the inception of the Anthropocene.

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