Oh Dear

So...It's that time of year when we have to record our activities as scholars at my job. And it turns out (I didn't know this until just now) that:

I did 26 lectures, presentations and conference type things.

I published 26 essays. (That's even more than I had thought.)

(Of cours I remember that I published 2 books.)

This on top of normal teaching (2 classes per term) and normal service (inside and outside school on committees, writing reports and so on).

Could this be why sometimes I feel like I'm just going to fall over asleep?

Ack!

Nip the STEM in the Bud

According to recent research schizophrenic brains prune more neurons more aggressively than other brains.

And this explains 1.25% of schizophrenia, on the authors' own admission. One point two five percent.

A few months before that, it's that schizophrenics have too many neuronal connections.

Or it's a parasitic worm.

Or...

And in the news article, the university PR department's retweet that this is a huge mega breakthrough. Allowing the actual scientists the wiggle room for the “batteries not included” disclaimer that it isn't one (so give us more funding). Adding up to a nice truthsome package.

And this sort of thing is why “humanities is in decline”? STEM on the rise? STEM called STEM?

The stem of anything simply can't be blind computation and the stem of learning can't be training how to be a much less good calculator than the app in my phone. And the result of all that machination, and machination funding, can't be leaving 98.75% of my brother's condition unexplained.

You know what? I'm making a late breaking new years' resolution.

1.25%? Until neuroscience can explain what schizophrenia actually is—and this will, ahem, require proving that it exists—I'm not going to believe another word it says (I was already down to about 10%). And write a little note to whatever media outlet delivers an irksome scientistic factoid as The Truth.

At least theoretical physicists have the good grace to admit that they are entangled with the patterns in data they are paid to find and think about. Which is why a huge majority of them are now concerned that we don't actually know s*** about reality.

In the mid 90s I was sitting next to a neuropharmacologist on a plane, and I was desperate about my schizophrenic brother, and he was telling me all about olanzapine (drug for people with schizophrenia). And I was so ready to believe what I later realized was just a snake oil pitch.

“This new miracle fact/drug will explain everything (away). Relax!” Once you've heard it 678436742 times you start to get a little bit exasperated.

The first peoples did a much better job of defining what we call schizophrenia. You hear the voice of ancestors or spirits more than others? You need to go to shaman camp!

Even the early agrilogisticals did a better job. You hear the voice of god, maybe you should be the king's astrologer or whatever.

Can these new guys even explain what a hallucination is? And can they make a clear distinction between one and a “normal” thought?

The media: “Since the dawn of time, man [deliberate] has been investigating schizophrenia, an ancient illness...”

No “he” hasn't. It was invented in the later nineteenth century. Read a book. Meanwhile my brother is still suffering.

(Incidentally, talking of man, and this needs a subsequent post, I need to tell you what happened when I went through my nth training at my new job on how to interview people, aka how not to be a complete sexist or racist or ask people about their religion etc. It involves a chemistry professor who “Just didn't understand why it's always the men who are obviously better candidates for our jobs” and a computer science professor so angry that he stormed out of the room red faced. And me, the ranking humanist in the room, doing my best hard Paddingtonian stares. And the brave psychology professor who convened the meeting doing her best to teach the stats on how questions can distort interviews to men who were acting mostly like schoolboys being punished. It's 2016 folks! And they say humanities is dead and STEM, etc etc etc ack.)

The MRI machine is the most expensive light show in history. “People played jazz on little wraparound touch sensitive sheets while listening to jazz on headphones. We saw lights on a display. This means that when you play jazz, our machine lights up. [DISCLAIMER: which came first is still, for some reason, inexplicable, by us.]” Wow. I must skin up immediately. This is cosmic.

Meanwhile, my kids spend the weekend doing computational tasks so onerous that most parents at their state schools end up doing those for them anyway. And it's not enough just to calculate. You have to present your calculations in boutique form. Decorate that meaningless cake! Or else! Which results in using computational prosthetics, so no one learns even computation.

Recently my 11-year-old daughter had to do a scale model of her bedroom. The rich kids came in on the Monday with plastic models that daddy's architecture firm had printed using a 3D printer--just input the numbers and hit return. One kid had been bought an iPod Touch simply to simulate the flat screen TV in her bedroom. The 3D printed model had been scaled to the iPod Touch! Simple. Plug in the ratio between the real TV and the iPod Touch. Then scale the model around that. Click. STEM.

The poor kids came in with drawings on paper. How do you think they felt?

Forget the fact that most of the universe appears to be dark matter and dark energy and that we still can't really explain what the heck is happening in the double slit experiment. We're talking about having so little idea of what a mind is, we can't even explain 98.75% of schizophrenia on our own admission, yet we get funded and the humanities scholars who might have helped out get ignored and unfunded. Might it not be surprising that they are a little bit lost and peeved right now?

Let's get back to how things should be:

You let humanists figure out what the f*** schizophrenia is, or isn't. Then you pay attention. Then you go and do some nice research to find out some more about stuff based on what you heard us say, okay?

Humanists need to learn about science and start getting out of their bunkers. Yes. But the reason for the bunkers needs to be addressed. The “third culture” vibe (Brockman) needs to be stopped.

You've got years and years and years to learn how to compute. It's a fun hobby for all. Maybe if you took the time to think a bit beforehand, you wouldn't rush into research (and funding research) that explains a statistically almost meaningless sliver of a major, horrifying (in our world) mental condition, then have the PR department feed it to news outlets conditioned to act as if it were the Truth.

Science does appearance. Engineering does how to manipulate appearance. We do reality. Nip the STEM in the bud.

Quick Subscendence Video

This is me at Sonic Acts last year. I begin to explain why subscendence is such a good idea...

Timothy Morton: Subscendence from Sonic Acts on Vimeo.

Of Course You can Do Something about Hyperobjects

Objects can't touch ontologically doesn't mean “You can't do anything about something politically.” Far from it. Almost the opposite, in a way, as I'll show here.

And actually it doesn't mean “You can't touch a stick of deodorant.” Of course you can.

Of course you can do something about global warming, a hyperobject. You can “touch” it. You can for instance reduce carbon emissions. Wow, you think I'm arguing there's nothing we can do about global warming?!

Ontologically withdrawn doesn’t mean that you can’t touch something ontically. Withdrawn means “not reducible to anything else.” And as I'm going to show this is really really good for anyone who wants to dismantle a thing.

Just changing labels really doesn’t help. For instance, someone recently worried about hyperobjects in the terms outlined above has suggested the term “situation.” “Situations” can touch each other and we can touch them (unlike, for some reason, hyperobjects). But “situation” is a diluted and vague label—I’m afraid it doesn’t yet rise to the level of “concept” so I can’t address it that way.

Various clues hint at a not so hidden agenda: the worry (this is an essay about the drug war as a “situation”) is coming from a Deleuzianism that's a bit cross, as it can be sometimes, that there’s a new way of thinking about things (OOO).

The main clue is that situation seems most like assemblage (the use of the neologism “assemblic” in the title of this particular essay is a clue).

OOO is much nicer than that, because “assemblage” is a reductionist concept.

The assemblage concept is saying that big things are just loose aggregates of smaller things. The very things we want to describe aren't actually described--they're reduced, which isn't the same thing. Happy nihilism, a philosophical tool of neoliberalism (aka agrilogistics 9.0) is really pleased that largely distributed things might only be loose affiliations of small things, because it means that they don't really exist, so you can do anything. For instance, if a  meadow is just a bunch of other things, you can argue that it doesn't really exist and build a parking lot on “it.” Deterritorial assemblage logic is pretty much how a lot of neoliberal logic works. There was perhaps a utopian moment for this logic when it sounded so fresh and different from the previous subversive logics, but we're way past that now in an age of corporate tax inversion, conceptual artists dictating Putin's foreign policy, and everything BP. 

OOO is saying that groups of things are also things that exist equally with their parts. There is an ontological gap between whole and parts.

But this in turn means that we have an awful lot more political wiggle room than we thought. Far from being disempowering, it's just about the most liberating ontological concept we've come up with in quite a while.

It actually gives us a really powerful political conceptual and tactical tool, because it means that the whole is always less than the sum of its parts (I invented this term subscendence to describe it). This is an incredibly counterintuitive idea (because we've been brainwashing each other for ever) but in the end it's a very easy to understand overturning of millennia of holist beliefs about sets (that wholes are bigger than the sums of their parts) that is really just a monotheism reteweet (and thus part of the problem). Dominic Boyer and I are talking about it in our book Hyposubjects.

There are plenty of political tactics outlined in Hyperobjects already, which circle around subscendence without directly naming it (sorry! Can't think everything all at once!). 

I think maybe that we are scared of naming big things precisely because we're still retweeting monotheism. We are hobbling our ability to cope with the entities we've unleashed. We think that if you name it, you've made it into a Thing (capital T), and that means a bit bad scary holistic being that lords it over its parts. This says more about our idea (or rather precritical assumptions) about sets than it does about things in the world. It gives rise to a paranoid, precisely “anti-Oedipal” (aka still relating to and caught up in the Oedipal, which is to say agrilogistical, dynamic!) style of engagement. Showing your behind to the political father (Barthes) means you think there is a father on a throne. 

You have swapped the holist tactic of substituting one god for another to the still-holist tactic of mooning a god.

The hyperobject concept and the subscendence that it implies give you something really toothsome and handy to hang on to and so they're ever so much better for tactical reasons than situation. Situation is more like a cloudy, slightly inverted version of the monotheist holism. We are caught (as the examples in the essay show) in various “situations” at which we throw up our hands, sinners in the hands of a cloudy god.

So behind the Deleuzianism there's something else. It's good old correlationism. A situation is anthropocentrically scaled. It's just a matter of changing your attitude, from using the term as a smoke screen behind which you can throw up your hands (“I'm in this situation, what can I do?”) to starting a needle exchange (for instance--the example is the drug war). If it's that easy, then there's nothing there apart from how you decide it to be. So your politics is mostly about getting the label right, rather than trying to work with reality. 

As Blake would say, I want a wiry bounding line. Determinacy means you can see your enemy clearly. 

British Banks: Hinting Not too Subtly that They Want Deregulating

...in such a typically British way: “I had to run you over, because you were crossing the road in the wrong place.”

MPs are opening their morning mail and discovering their bank accounts have been eliminated.

The letters will either say nothing or say that they are too much of a risk.

A bit of research by a plucky MP (Conservative, as it happens, doesn't matter) has show that they're over-applying a UN rule about money laundering! Like if you're a member of Parliament of some kind you are a greater risk because you might be laundering money.

What's amazing (see paragraph 1 for the reason) is that the BBC didn't immediately ask the banks “Why isn't this happening to any other member of any other government in Europe or America?” For that matter, it might in some cases be the exact same banks, that aren't treating any other customer anywhere else like that.

It's obvious what's happening when you hear the bank spokesperson: “Well, there are all of these regulations, hint hint, and we got fined $250 billion in the last few years, and you made all these new regulations, hint hint.”

They're needling British MPs to deregulate them and taking revenge for having been found out as the architects of the Great Recession.

No It's Not Ethical Nihilism

Two of you might have been worried yesterday at the lecture that if a bullet exists equally with a blue whale, then the bullet has some kind of right to be fired into the blue whale (just an example).

I gave a two part answer that really needed a third part, so here it is.

But first, here's a much more detailed lecture about it.

Anyway...

So first up I need to say, I'm not the object police so I'm not about telling you exactly what's out there. OOO is about how things exist if they do. There might be just five things in the universe. Or five trillion. I have no idea.

So an example, such as a bullet, remains hypothetical, in a certain sense.

Paragraph 1 describes accurately not OOO at all, but a certain strain of deep ecology, in which for instance HIV has just as much right to exist as an HIV victim. This is absurd.

And why it's absurd is precisely the danger of allowing ontology to come with an inevitable, snap-on ethics and politics. Peeling ethics away from ontology might give us the kind of wiggle room we'd need such that we don't end up creating absurd ideas like that.

The point is, since things exist equally and there's no inevitable ethics or politics that emerges from OOO, you are free to decide, much more free, in fact, than if you think it's only humans that “really” exist or only humans that matter or only humans or conscious beings or what have you to which ethics pertains. You have the controls! Do you want bullets to have the ability to kill all the blue whales? You have to make that decision based on something other than ontology, is all. And it's quite clear to me and anyone with a  pulse that your decision would suck.

This snap-on ethics thing is a symptom of anthropocentric correlationism. Suddenly things are a lot less clear. That's good, at least for a moment.

The other point is, if you stick around waiting for the whale to prove that she's a person, loads of people are going to shoot her. You need to make a decision to help her that doesn't require some deep stuff about the nature of reality.

It's just that for about two hundred years “reality” has coincided exactly with human social, psychic and philosophical space.

It has another side effect, this coinciding. It gives rise to that idea that we're totally shrink-wrapped in our world, imprisoned in ideology or what have you. And the subsequent self-defeating left intelligence performance of “I can show that we're so much worse off than you think, therefore I'm more intelligent than you.” How's this disempowering idea been working out so far?

The other point is that everything becomes political, which is great. You are already making unconscious implicit decisions to care or not care for all kinds of nonhumans. OOO just makes all that very very explicit. And in a world where everything is political, no political system can be perfect and absolutely right. Someone or something is always left out. My affiliation with blue whales means I'm going to exclude bullets. So what?

So, this is quite the opposite of ethical nihilism, no?

Anyway, if you truly want to get nihilism from ontology, try an extreme reductionist one, not an irreductionist one such as OOO. Something along the lines of: I don't exist, I really really don't exist, not even as a good enough illusion, because “I” is just a manifest image of some material flux beaming through neurons. So you can kinda do what you want with me, because there isn't a me.

A Hat Listening to my Lecture

A kind awesome person, Erin Eichenberger, sent my host a photo of her hat listening to my lecture with two hundred humans and about 250 chairs, some water and mikes and dust and...

Thanks College of William and Mary! That was really meaningful for me.

In Willliamsburg

Right in it, right in the colonial central part. Extraordinary. If you don't know what I'm talking about you should definitely look it up! I'm here for this lecture.

Time Emerges from Objects

...don't take OOO's word for it: talk to a quantum theorist.

New Yorker Review of Chris Schaberg's Book on Air Travel

The thing is, he was my Ph.D. student, so I'm super proud of him. And he's my friend at this point, so I'm super happy for him.

Ecology and Spectrality

I'm particularly interested in this part of the essay, because spectrality is a major, major component of Humankind (Verso). Check it out. Sentence 1 of that book:

A SPECTER IS HAUNTING THE SPECTER OF COMMUNISM. THE SPECTER OF THE NONHUMAN.

hahahaha...right? Right??

Anyway here's more of this essay:

Cantor showed that there is a gap between numbers and sets of numbers.Likewise there is a gap between lifeforms and sets of lifeforms.We can think of these sets as ecosystems, biomes, biosphere—we can think of these sets at any scale, and there is no easy continuity between these sets. An environment is just a certain set of lifeforms.The way one does ecological research is to establish a somewhat arbitrary set—to define a boundary sometimes called a mesocosm, in which one observes lifeforms coming and going, reproducing, struggling. An ecosystem is vague, in the sense that paradoxes called Sorites paradoxes arise when one attempts to define them precisely. How many blades of grass do I have to remove for this meadow not to be a meadow? One—surely not. Two—still a meadow. Three, four, and so on—and the same logic applies until I have only one blade of grass left. I conclude, wrongly,that there is no meadow.These paradoxes plague sets of lifeforms at any scale, and therefore it is strictly impossible to think ecological reality via a meta- physics of presence, namely, a belief that to be a thing, you have to be constantly present.

It is paradoxically much better to think that there is a meadow and there is not a meadow at the same time. We seem to have violated the supposed Law of Noncontradiction, asserted but not proved in Section Gamma of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. There is a meadow, but we can’t point to it directly, because it’s not constantly present. And yet here is the meadow, with the butterflies, the cowslips, the voles. Just as a vole is a set of things that are not voles, so the meadow is a set of things such as voles that are not meadows.

Thus a spectral strangeness that haunts being applies not only to lifeforms—a vole is a not-vole—but also to meadows, ecosystems, biomes and the biosphere. The haunting, withdrawn yet vivid spectrality of things also means that there can be sets of things that are not strictly members of that set, and this violates Russell’s prohibition on the set paradox that arises precisely through thinking Cantor’s transfinite sets.Transfinite sets are as we just saw sets of numbers that contain sets of numbers that are not strictly members of that set.There is an irreducible gap between the set of real numbers and the set of rational numbers—Cantor himself, like Gödel, drove himself crazy trying to find a smooth continuum between the two. This drive to find a continuum is a hangover from the Law of Noncontradiction, which has never been formally proved, but which has been accepted as a precondi- tion for philosophy since Aristotle.

OOO and Nihilism: Nihilism Upgraded

From my essay for Tom Bristow:

Let us now consider object-oriented ontology (OOO), the philosophical view to which I subscribe.What object-oriented ontology does is to multiply the cracks in the real everywhere.There are as many cracks in the real as there are things. Because reality just is things, and things just are riven from the inside between what they are and how they appear, even to themselves. There is a human–world gap. There is a toaster–world gap.There is a crack between octopuses and toasters.There is a crack between octopuses and octopuses: octopus thing and octopus phenomena are fissured from within.There is a crack between this octopus and this coral reef; a crack between this coral reef itself and this coral reef itself. Like some astonishingly beautiful piece of Japanese raku, reality is just riddled with trillions of cracks. OOO is thus the first western view to embrace the nothingness with no hesitation whatsoever.And thus OOO performs the task of overcoming nihilism—which as Nietzsche and Heidegger argued cannot be overcome by pushing or resisting but by going in and transforming from underneath.

Working for Tom Bristow

Tom is a really wonderful ecological humanist and I'm just proofreading an essay I wrote for him right now. We've been working on it for a while and he's really helped me to get it really nice-sounding. There's something very compact and incisive about it. It's going to be in a book called A Cultural History of Climate Change and I think it's going to be really interesting to readers. Dipesh Chakrabarty opens it up and my essay closes it.

Look at this for example:

hyperobjects, massively distributed entities such as global warming, biosphere, evolution, electromagnetism—the discoveries of the nineteenth century and after—are precisely efficient in reopening the gap for us. Hyperobjects are things that one can compute and think, but not see or touch (Morton, 2013). It is as if in the case of hyperobjects, reason were capable of slapping us upside the head with a dose of reality, or better, as if through reason we figured out that we were not the greatest and final creatures on Earth, but rather that we were inhabiting all kinds of gigantic entities that are thinkable, yet invisible. The nineteenth century was the moment at which the hyperobject we call El Niño was conceptualized, a vast climatic system in the Pacific that affects weather—a gigantic being whose existence can be surmised but not directly seen, only indirectly and vicariously in phenomena such as rain and drought.

"There Is No Problem with X because We Don't Talk about It"

...this is pretty much how the UK does ideology. Insert anything for the X: homophobia, bullying...and the oil price crash. Today is the very first time I've heard the stock market woes linked to oil--oil mentioned at all, in fact--in all the weeks and weeks that this has been going on. Finally someone mentioned, very briefly, the price of Brent Crude. And all they said was that “people would normally react well to this falling price [!] but for some reason, because people are scared [I wonder what that other reason is?] they aren't."

It reminds me of 2008. They called it “the credit crunch” when in fact it might better have been called “terrifying meltdown of derivatives.” Credit crunch sounds like “blimey, I'm a bit short, you wouldn't happen to have a fiver on you?”

My nervous little Texan driving colleagues, allow me to teach you how to turn left at the lights

0. If there's a turn signal, wait until you can use it. But if there isn't:

1. When the light goes green, drive nice and slow into the middle of the box shape between the four intersecting streets.

2. When there's a nice gap in traffic on your left, turn left.

You will find you are able to execute 2 in a leisurely way but with panache almost automatically.

If there's a car turning right, it can do so simultaneously now. Nice! In the UK it's called an offside-offside turn.

This will obviate:

A. Turning super fast in front of me when it's my right of way and nearly getting us killed.

B. Turning super fast just as the lights go red and it's the other guy's right of way.

Is driving right out into the middle as I'm suggesting too scary, or too exposing, or what? What is it, because it must be intense: you would rather we both be killed than have that happen, whatever it is.

Killed in your great big fearsome confidence-mobile. So-called. Quite probably with a cattle grille or bullbar as you say in front. But still you're scared to turn left.

You know taxes are really bad but you don't know this?

I'm sort of begging here, at this point.