Timothy Morton Quotes

The assumption that Derrida always knows what he is talking about is not Derridean.

We are all burnt by ultraviolet rays. We all contain water in about the same ratio as Earth does, and salt water in the same ratio that the oceans do. We are poems about the hyperobject Earth.

Beauty is a nonviolent experience of near death, a warning that one is fragile, like everything else in the universe.

The more we analyze, the more ambiguous things become.

Being a person means never being sure that you're one.

Beauty is how objects end. Beauty is death.

Personhood then is also in the mesh-- it may look solid from a distance, but as we approach it we discover that it is full of holes

Writing about music really is like dancing about architecture--and a good thing, too. Everything is like that.

A certain degree of audiovisual hallucination happens when we read poetry.

I call this double truth of a thing its fragility, the inner fragility of a thing is why a thing can exist at all. Fragility is also why anything at all can happen. Existence is incompleteness. This fragility is activated in what is called destruction.

For beauty to work, there must be a surface capable of receiving the wound.

The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy -- for some, strangely or frighteningly easy -- to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up.

Am I a nihilistic postmodernist or a New Ager in academig drag?

Correlationism is like a mixing desk in a music recording studio. It has two faders: the correlator and the correlatee.

I think that this music could liquefy my internal organs, make my ears bleed (this has actually occurred), send me into seizures. Perhaps it could kill me. To be killed by intensed beauty, what a Keatsian way to die.

The strategy of this book, then, is to awaken us from the dream that the world is about to end, because action on Earth (the real Earth) depends on it. The end of the world has already occurred. We can be uncannily precise about the date on which the world ended. Convenience is not readily associated with historiography, nor indeed with geological time. But in this case, it is uncannily clear. It was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that commenced the depositing of carbon in Earth’s crust—namely, the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale.

In the event of beauty, a non-self part of my inner space seems to resonate in the colors on the wall, in the sounds pouring into my ears. Hugely amplified, might this resonance actually kill me? “A beautiful way to die” – to be destroyed by vibrations that removed myself from myself.

The ecological thought affects all aspects of life, culture, and society.

Death is powerful and compelling; life is fragile and shivery.

When you see evil as a thing apart from yourself "over there," you can fly a plane into it or destroy it with a powerful bomb. You can justify murder. Evil is the gaze that sees evil as a thing apart from me.

It's ironic that we can imagine the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves more readily than we can the collapse of the banking system-and despite this, amazingly, as this book was written, the banking system did collapse.

Nature is…animals, trees, the weather…the bioregion, the ecosystem. It is both the set and the contents of the set. It is the world and the entities in that world. It appears like a ghost at the never-arriving end of an infinite series: crabs, waves, lightning, rabbits, silicon…Nature.

We can get a sense of it, to be sure, though it will upgrade our ideas of "real" and "thing" to boot. Ecology shows us that all beings are connected. The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness. The ecological thought is a thought about ecology, but it's also a thinking that is ecological. Thinking the ecological thought is part of an ecological project. The

Solidarity requires having something in common. But having something in common is exactly what culturalism sees as essentialism, and thus as reactionary primitivism. How do you get there—solidarity—from here—the strong correlationism that lords over Marxist, anti-imperialist and imperialist thought domains? Perhaps having something in common is a spurious, dangerous concept? Perhaps we could reimagine solidarity without having anything in common? This is the popular approach from within strong correlationism. Or perhaps—and this is Humankind’s approach—we could reimagine what “to have in common” means. I chose the title Humankind as a deliberate provocation to those scholars who think that “having in common” is based on ideas that are less acceptable than farting in church.

we should not give up on the aesthetic dimension, which is, ultimately, the reverberation of sentience (pain). If, as Derrida observes, there are only different forms of narcissism rather than narcissism and something else, the true escape from narcissism would be a dive further into it, and an extension of it (Derrida's word) to include as many other beings as possible.12l By heightening the dilemma of a body and a material world haunted by mind(s), we care for the ecosystem, which in sum is interconnectedness. The ecological thought, the thinking of interconnectedness, has a dark side embodied not in a hippie aesthetic of life over death, or a sadistic sentimental Bambification of sentient beings, but in a "goth" assertion of the contingent and necessarily queer idea that we want to stay with a dying world: dark ecology.

Cuanto más sabes acerca de algo, tanto más extraño se vuelve.

For its part, science is about being able to admit that you're wrong.

We are living textbooks on global warming and nuclear materials, crisscrosssed with interobjective calligraphy.

A WHILE BACK, a game designer friend of mine named Phil Fish made a plea on Twitter, “Hey bloggers, no more ‘blank rebuilt in Minecraft’ posts, please. We get it. You can make things in Minecraft. Thanks.” Fish was referring to the popular online game Minecraft, in which players hunt for resources that are used to construct models and apparatuses with the game’s characteristic, cubical visual style. The Internet being what it is, given such tools extreme fans do insane things, like elaborately reconstructing the city King’s Landing from Game of Thrones using nothing but this square matter mined from Minecraft. Seeing Fish’s tweet, an enterprising ironoiac recreated the form of the embedded tweet itself inside Minecraft, a fact that the tech blog VentureBeat then dutifully blogged about, thus completing not one but two cycles of an ironoia self-treatment the environmental philosopher Timothy Morton names “anything you can do I can do meta.”14 In a futile attempt to prevent further metastasis, the blogger concluded his post with the line, “Yes, we’re fully aware of the irony of this post.”15 But rather than satisfying anyone, such a provocation only further irritated the ironoiac itch. Fish tweeted a link to the blog post covering the Minecraft construction of a model of Fish’s tweet protesting blog posts about Minecraft constructions, which one of his followers one-upped by observing the fact that Fish had in fact “tweeted about somebody blogging about somebody making [his] tweet about Minecraft in Minecraft.” Another chimed in, “How long ’til someone recreates that blog post in Minecraft?” Each step represents an attempt to overcome the absurdity of the last by fixing it in a new voice, even though each ironic gesture was evanescent, quickly replaced by yet another layer of buffer from yet another desperate ironoiac. Why do we do it, then? Today, satisfaction is more elusive than ever. In part, the precarity of life after the 2008 global financial collapse and the Great Recession that followed it (and whose effects still linger) makes every transaction with the world feel suspect and risky. We fear that things might turn on us, because we have good evidence that they can, and do. But

Where fire really burns and the light itself burns your eyes, where songs are the most beautiful songs you have ever heard, and emotions passed over in daily life take on a horrifying, uncanny hue

The mysterious quality of artworks is a signal of the mysterious quality of objects in general. Beauty is a secret that we know exists but whose content we don't know. When we share it with other, it's as if we are in on the same secret. We look at each other in amazement or with knowing look. But it's impossible to specify what this secret is. Only the fact that there is a secret is of any importance. Beauty is based on the raw fact of the secret as such.

Beauty is nonconceptual. Nothing in the object directly explains it.

Wholes subscend their parts, which means that parts are not just mechanical components of wholes, and that there can be genuine surprise and novelty in the world, that a different future is always possible. It is good to regard things such as capitalism as physical beings, not simply as fictions that would disappear if we just stopped believing in them. But what kind of physical beings are they? If they are susbcendent, it means that we can change them, if we want. What if some things could be physically huge, yet ontologically tiny? What if neoliberalism, which envelopes Earth in misery, were actually quite small in another way, and thus strangely easy to subvert? Too easy for intellectuals, who want to make everything seem difficult so they can keep themselves in a job by explaining it, or outdo each other in competition for whose picture of the world is more depressing. „I am more intelligent than you because my picture of neoliberalism is far more terrifying and encompassing than yours. We are truly enslaved in my vision, with no hope of escape – therefore I am superior to you!” Isn’t this a tragic consequence of what some call cynical reason, the dominant way of being right for the last two hundred years?

la «forma» del pensamiento ecológico es al menos tan importante como su «contenido».

Perhaps indifference itself is pointing to a way to care for humans and nonhumans in a less violent way- simply allowing them to exist, like pieces of paper in your hand, like a story you might appreciate- or not- for no reason.

Maybe beauty is death, in a way, just like the decadent aesthetes used to say. It's a reminder that things are fragile, because when one thing envelopes another thing, that other thing might be overwhelmed or destroyed.

Several thousand years from now, nothing about you as an individual will matter. But what you did will have huge consequences. This is the paradox of the ecological age. And it is why action to change global warming must be massive and collective.

The idea that there are multiple worlds because there are multiple lifeforms and that no one world or scale is the "right" one means that efficiency is only efficient from a particular standpoint. For example, the idea of sustainability implies that the system we now have is worth sustaining.