Creation comes out of vulnerability

Björk to Timothy Morton:

"Hi Timothy,

I wanted to write this letter for a long time.

I have been reading your books for a while and I like them a lot.

Next year there will be a MoMA exhibition on my work including a book.

I was wondering if you’d be interested in taking part in it?

Warmth, Björk.”

Timothy Morton to Björk:

“Dear Björk,

It was very kind of you to write to me, and I’m very touched by your kind words.

I am always quite surprised anyone reads my stuff!

I would be thrilled to be part of the MoMA catalogue.

Your work has been a very deep influence on my way of thinking and life in general.

I like to be given homework in terms of what to write (perpetual student!), so do tell me more about what specifications you might like.

It truly seems to me that there is some kind of shift happening towards ecological awareness – not just in terms of PR for the science.

I have heard this in your work since I started to listen to it.

Yours, Tim”

The rest is here.

Björk - MoMA, NYC - Preview

A loucura do Antropoceno

"À medida que o trabalho de Morton se estende para lá dos hierofantes culturais como Björk e entra nas páginas dos maiores órgãos de informação, ele está talvez a transformar-se no nosso mais popular guia para a nova época. Sim, é verdade que ele tem algumas ideias que parecem muito loucas acerca do que significa estar vivo nos tempos actuais – mas o que significa estar vivo exactamente agora, no Antropoceno, é efectivamente muito louco."



"Morton compara esta consciencialização com as histórias de detectives em que o perseguidor percebe que se está a perseguir a si próprio (os seus exemplos favoritos são Blade Runner e Édipo Rei). “Nem todos nós estamos preparados para ficarmos suficientemente assustados [com esta epifania]”, declara. Mas existe outra reviravolta: apesar de os seres humanos terem causado o Antropoceno, não podemos controlá-lo. “Oh, meu Deus”, exclamou Morton ante mim a certa altura, fingindo estar horrorizado. “A minha tentativa de escapar da teia do destino era a teia do destino.”

Mais aqui.

THERE IS NO META LANGUAGE

[I've got you under my skin]

"Waking up in the shadow of the unseen power of hyperobjects is like finding yourself in a David Lynch movie in which it becomes increasingly uncertain whether you are dreaming or awake. Humans are forced to confront phenomenological sincerity, the truth that ´there is no meta language'. [...] We have not traversed the curtain of illusion into a world of certainty. [...] As Laurie Anderson put in her song [...] 'What is behind the curtain?' THE PLAY OF ILLUSION AND CONCEALMENT IS A SYMPTOM OF REALITY. [...] The further into the Great Acceleration we go, the more we shall need to confront feelings of unreality."
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects

Laurie Anderson - Born, never asked

A arte de tirar o tapete

"Anything you can do, I can do meta."

"Going meta is a great way to sneer at someone. You remove the rug from underneath the other's feet. Their mere immediacy is always false. It's the deep structure, the numinous background, the possibility of the possibility of the horizon of the event, that is more real, better, or just more rhetorically effective, than anything else. [...] The syndrome of going meta is repeated in countless different philosophical modes."
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects

Arte e ecologia

Isaac Cordal

"Pensemos no aquecimento global como uma bomba atómica em câmara ultra lenta. A vingança ecológica. Uma lenta violência sobre todos os seres vivos."
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects

Ser altruísta é mau?

Ayn Rand - Why Altruism is Evil 

"Humans must learn to care for fatal substances [nuclear stuff, por exemplo] that will outlast them and their descendants beyond any meaningful limit of self-interest. What we need is an ethics of the other, an ethics based on proximity of the stranger."
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects]

do tempo presente

A river without banks, Marc Chagall

"The present does not truly exist. We experience a crisscrossing set of force fields, the aesthetic-causal fields emanated by a host of objects. Anyone familiar with relativity theory will find this idea reasonably intuitive. What is called present is simply a reification, an arbitrary boundary drawn around things by a particular entity — a state, philosophical view, government, family, electron, black hole. Time is not a series of now-points (Aristotle himself refuted this idea) but rather a sickening surge, like crosstown traffic, or an ocean with many currents; or 'a river without banks,' like the title of a painting by Marc Chagall. Time is a flurry of spells and counterspells cast by objects themselves. Past and future do not intersect in the usually visualized way, as (say) the left-hand and right-hand sides of a cursor blinking on a screen. What we have instead is a nonspatial rift between past and future that corresponds to the Rift between appearance and essence. Between these two fundamental forces, the present is nowhere: objects are never present."

Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects

We ARE here and we ARE NOT here, at the same time

"When you see a 'Magic Eye' picture, you realize that all the little squiggles that you thought were individual squiggles are actually distributed pieces of a higher-dimensional object that seems to emerge when you do that crossing-your-eyes thing. In a Magic Eye picture, the cup or flower is distributed throughout the mesh of fuzzy little patches of the image. 'The object is already there'. Before we look at it. Global warming is not a function of our measuring devices. Yet because it's distributed across the biosphere and beyond, it's very hard to see as a unique entity. And yet, there it is, raining on us, burning down on us, quaking the Earth, spawning gigantic hurricanes. Global warming is an object of which many things are distributed pieces: the raindrops falling on my head in Northern California. The tsunami that pours through the streets of Japanese towns. The increasing earthquake activity based on changing pressure on the ocean floor. Like the image in a Magic Eye picture, global warming is real, but it involves a massive, counterintuitive perspective shift to see it. Convincing some people of it's existence is like convincing some two-dimensional Flatland people of the existence of apples, based on the appearence of a morphing circular shape in their world."

Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects

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Catexias

"The ego is a poem about strangers: the blow of a hand, an abandonment, the hardness of a bed, the warmth of a teddy bear."
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects

"Apocalypse know"

O blog de Timothy Morton

da viscosidade III

"The sticky mirror demonstrates the truth of what phenomenology calls 'ingenuous' or 'sincerity'. Objects are what they are, in the sense that no matter what we are aware of, or how, there they are, impossible to shake off. In the midst of irony, there you are, being ironic. Even mirrors are what they are, no matter what they reflect. In its sincerity, reality envelopes us like a film of oil. The mirror becomes a 'substance', an object. Hyperobjects push the reset button on sincerity, just as Neo discovers that the mirror no longer distances his image from him in a nice, aesthetically manageable way, but sticks to him."
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects

All things are connected / da viscosidade II / Linking stuff

"A good example of viscosity would be radioactive materials. The more you try to get rid of them, the more you realize you can't get rid of them. They seriously undermine the notion of 'away'. Out of sight is no longer out of mind, because if you bury them in Yucca Mountain, you know that they will leach into the water table."
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects

da viscosidade

"The more I struggle to understand hyperobjects, the more I discover that I am stuck to them. They are all over me. They are me. I feel like Neo in The Matrix, lifting to his face in horrified wonder his hand coated in the mirrorlike substance into which the doorknob has dissolved, as his virtual body begins to disintegrate."
Timothy Morton, in Hyperobjects, Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

"Objects in mirror are closer then they appear."
"The mirror itself has become part of my flesh. Or rather, I have become part of the mirror's flesh, reflecting hyperobjects everywhere. I can see data on the mercury and other toxins in my blood. At Taipei Airport, a few weeks after the Fukushima disaster, I am scanned for radiation since I have transited in Tokyo. Every attempt to pull myself free by some act of cognition renders me more hopelessly stuck to hyperobjects."
Timothy Morton, in Hyperobjects, Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World