(((Knowledge Ecology)))

I’m sure many of you have experienced the speed with which thoughts multiply when encountering the living thought of an inspired thinker.  New ideas fire across every available neuron channel, new synapses are formed to accommodate the overflow of thought, words crash against words as you try to capture something of the lightning storm swelling in your brain. Such thoughts move too quickly to ever be captured on paper. Tim Morton’s talk this evening was a little like such an experience, except completely the reverse — effectively slowing down the complicated chatter that usually surrounds the topics he encircled (e.g., global warming, nuclear weapons, David Lynch films) into an observable slow-motion molasses that, for a second, conjured the absolutely strange, vulnerable, and alien(ating) situation the beings of Earth are currently experiencing. Perhaps this slow dive into the abyss of the ecological crisis is precisely appropriate — an attunement to the extended pace of glaciers, continents, and evolution. Its too late in the evening to scribble down the kind of response his talk deserves, lucky for me the notes I took down have their own sort of aesthetic, communicative quality that can perhaps convey a bit of what Tim was able to conjure tonight (I am an unabashed fan of a good sentence fragment). Enjoy.

Tim Morton – Enter the Nonhuman: A New Phase in Aesthetics, C.C.A

November 15, 2011

• The time of hyperobjects (biosphere, climate, evolution, global warming, nuclear materials, population, pollution) – the Anthropocene [population as autonomous ecological entity]
• The moment humans begin to have an influence geologically on the planet
• 1945 “the great acceleration” the influence on the geology of the earth speeds up
• History now intersects with what is called nature
• We are living in the shadow of the hyperobject – part of it is embedded within us. Away has disappeared
• A new age of intimacy has arrived – ecological politics and ethics is based on coexisting.
• The age of asymmetry
• Knowledge is no longer able to achieve escape velocity from Earth – we are no longer poised at the edge of the abyss
• The uncanny time of zombies at the end of the world. Like 7 billion Jonases inside multiple intersecting giant whales
• Revenge of the nonhumans. Hegel’s aesthetics – symbolic/classical/romantic
• “The inner infinite ranges over the world of things like a ghost in search of a destination.”
• The story shape to music – creating three dimensional worlds
• Art must tell the story of its inability to tell the story of the spirit
• To think the death of the beyond is to think the death of substances right here
• The romantic period is a decisive moment in the Anthropocene
• Human’s are not in charge of the show; they are not the musicians
• Emerging critical environments
• “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”
• The nonhuman romantic hero the piano
• Anarchic autonomy
• The doom of wire and wood
• We are hearing music that is tuning to the equipment, rather than the reverse – strings and instruments have been liberated from telling a human story
• All objects are profoundly withdrawn, withdrawn from human access
• We have not lost the sense of inner space, we have found it in all things
• Irony has lost its post/late modern edge
• Asymmetric irony – Apocalypse Now/Chogyam Trumpa
• Things do not coincide with their appearance
• Art in the age of asymmetry must be a practice of “tuning”
• The Greek demon (daimon)
• Art as attunement to the inbetween worlds – where fire really burns
• Lame, weak, hypocrites
• Modernity is dead like some kind of dinosaur slayed by a global catastrophe
• The geostationary orbit of a metalanguage
• Constructivism is fundamentally romantic
• Fantasies of transcendental nothingness brought the hyperobject into being/experience
• Aesthetic distance is the main factor in the production of the concept nature
• The object-oriented approach subtends relations
• Strange strangers are irreducibly uncanny Derrida’s “arrivant”
• Very large finitude, making infinity embarrassingly easy
• The constructivist work is a map trying to give you more, more than you can ever deal with
• Chris Wainwright’s iceberg photograph (Wordsworth “the feminine is in play”) the ocean looks like a rippling layer of latex (objects are closer than they appear)
• The iceberg haunts us without background, without world, it delivers – a vital ecological truth – coexistence with nonhumans!
• “Wherever you go, there you are”
• Sincerity eats irony
• A world far to close to be called a world. A monument to the beginning of history.
• The aestheticizing glass screen of the computer
• Hypocrisy, weakness, and lameness
• The hermetic seal of other beings, unwitting footprints of other beings
• Nonhumans pressing on in all sides on the charnel ground at the of the world.
• The uncanny charnel ground
• Global warming is now in the uncanny valley
• Looking through the spherical glass sphere; climate change is not behind the glass screen. It is the glass screen, reaching out frighteningly towards you. Withdrawing and imposing at the same time
• The whale is a higher dimensional being than ourselves; a hyperobject is a higher dimensional being
• Art has to be a part of the glass itself; speaking independently of what we want it to say
• Tuning to nonhumans, violin strings, bamboo, ultraviolet radiation
• Art that keeps us in the uncanny valley. Weirdness.
• Too much knowledge. We need to acclimatize ourselves
• Its not about complexity, it’s about intimacy
• The coexistence of real beings. Coexistence as ontological nonviolence. Ontologically the universe is an anarchy
• Withdrawal as unspeakable thisness right here. Space-time as the aesthetic dimension, causality
• Intimacy as noticing something that is already the case. What you have without a world is intimacy
• “Beyond nature is this sort of spooky clown world”
• We are already intimate with nonhumans, we don’t have to make anything happen
• The way things appear is their past