Zitat des Tages von Timothy Morton:
'Do not touch ontologically' doesn't mean 'are separated by empirically measurable hard edges.'
An environment is precisely something one is unable to point to yet is strangely there nonetheless.
Trivially speaking, ecological awareness means realising that beings are interconnected in some way, but then we have to figure out what this interconnection actually means.
Since a thing cannot be known directly or totally, one can only attune to it, with greater or lesser degrees of intimacy.
You wouldn't believe how many philosophers are afraid of movement.
I grew up in a haunting postindustrial landscape where prehistoric ferns grew among tens of railway tracks surmounted by brilliant arc lights where birds nested and sang in the dead of night, because for them, it was day.
One advantage of arguing that causality is aesthetic is that it allows us to consider what we call consciousness alongside what we call things.
Does anyone recall hippies designing things for Generation X? Does anyone recall the elegance of that? How design was about making things simpler?
We intellectuals are not stupid: we know the phenomenology of guilt is a bad photocopy of the phenomenology of thought, so it's much cheaper to press that button.
Aesthetic experiences are powerful, to be sure, and probably inescapable, but Nature will not remain effective for very long.
Unfortunately, there are some ecological phenomenological chemicals within consumerism.
I try to have little or no alcohol when I go to a big conference. Sorry to be a party pooper, but that stuff can regress you really fast, and this is not a good place to regress.
Before there was Bjork, there was Prince. That's a very simple encapsulation of my personal pop life.
I'm not unhappy with the idea of appealing to people's self-interest if that's what makes them understand something about the non-human world.
It's very important that we keep our imagination, which is our capacity to open the future, awake at a time at which the urge to collapse into the fetal position is high.
OOO objects have all the abjection added back in. They don't behave like normalized patriarchal subjects at all.
It's easier to be Eric Idle than to be Paul McCartney.
Symbiosis can fail in various different ways: if there's too much stomach bacteria in my stomach, I might have some problems. If there's too little, I might have some problems. There's a sort of dynamic system there.
Anyone who has trouble imagining causality as magical and uncanny need only consider the existence of children.
I discover in my experiential space evidence for the wrongness of solipsism, and this evidence is called beauty.
An artist attunes to what things are, which means sort of listening to the future, which is just how things are - I think time is a sort of liquid that pours out of hatpins, underground trains, salt crystals. So a work of art is also listening to itself, because what it is never quite coincides with how it appears, too.
Psychologism holds that logical assertions are percolations of brains. Thus logic is a set of rules for how healthy brains operate. Aside from the infinite regress of a brain determining whether a brain is healthy, we have the infinite regress of the idea 'All concepts are brain percolations' being itself a brain percolation, on its own terms.
Fear of nothingness is fear of a certain physicality, a physicality whose phenomena I cannot predictably demarcate from its reality in advance.
Beauty doesn't have to be in accord with prefabricated concepts of 'pretty.'
'Free speech' isn't speech at all if it's being used without listening, attention, or care.
An adjective, such as 'flimsy,' describes someone's access to a thing, such as 'argument.' But that's just that someone's access. It may be accurate. But it's theirs nevertheless.
Humans can no longer ignore nonhumans: they end up haunting the words we use and interrupting everyday talk.
There is no essence, but there is a flux that is more real than any instance of the flux, such as a milk bottle or a tiger.
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.
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.
We like to think, in our anthropocentric way, that irony means that you transcended something, but actually, what it means is that you've realised that you're stuck in something, and you have this kind of uncanny awareness of that, and there's not much you can do about that feeling of stuckness.
I find it beyond stunning that there is a school of thought or two out there that swears we are into solids and that solids are bad and liquids are good.
Since when did scientific evidence become a reason to shy away from ecological action just because it wasn't popular?
Since appearance can't be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing, attunement is a living, dynamic relation with another being.
I so totally refuse to 'make an effort to understand' the people who have become vectors for a fascist spectacular politics.
When you watch one person on stage trying to surmount their fate only in that very action to embody it, it's called a tragedy. When you see a lot of people doing it on stage, it's called 'Fawlty Towers.'
