Past Talks Updated

Haven't done it for a while. Sorry!

Extricating Arendt from the Dustbin

Not so fast Mr. Historian: 

“This, of course, is not the Eichmann of Hannah Arendt (“the world’s worst court reporter,” as I’ve described her), who credulously bought into his “poor schlub,” pen pusher trial defense — just following orders, moving things along deep within the bureaucracy...
...
Functionalism [the idea that the Nazis simply exploited the Jews], going strong when I first wrote this book, has been cast into the dustbin of history along with ‘the banality of evil’.”

That's so not what Arendt is talking about. She is describing how banality itself is evil, not a cover for evil. Banality depends upon a lack of anxiety, the basic affect, the emotion that never lies etc. Psychopaths offer extremely banal explanations for their behavior. Which is not in the last to say that they didn't sadistically enjoy it. Banality is a form of sadistic enjoyment. 

Just listen to anything by Throbbing Gristle, e.g almost anything on 20 Jazz Funk Greats, or the first track on the Second Annual Report. You will hear people talking blandly about absurd cruelty. Casually.  

Hypostasizing “evil” as this smoking metaphysical lump of coal totally misses this, as the end of Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits makes quite clear. 

Banal << “pertaining to compulsory feudal service” (OED). The enjoyment of being a component of a hierarchical machine. Casual. Slack. Just another day...

"The Real Physical World"

Spot the metaphysical assumption. 

It can be stated thus: quantum phenomena are effects of measurement. 

<< to measure is to make real 

= correlationism

>> Bohr: “There is no quantum world.”

This ontology has already been decided on, then erased, before the argument even gets off the ground. 

Going South

Apollo 440 did their usual fantastic job here. The music is so vast I listened to it driving hundreds of miles, south of course, in Colorado, to Crestone.

The jaded noirish vocals are just excellent.

I don't know why but the vocals plus the music seem to say “Right, that's it. I'm evacuating samsara, now. ”

Indeed it appears to at 6:40.

Contact Is Content (Olafur Eliasson)

Wow, I'm looking at the try-out for this beautiful new book by Olafur Eliasson. It's photographs of land. That is such a flat description! How to put it into words. Very difficult. There is something unspeakable about it.

He has used my phrase Contact Is Content for the title. Well I said The contact becomes the content and he compressed it. I prefer the compressed version...always nice to be remixed...

The photographs exemplify this sentence, silently. Actually that's not quite right. The title exemplifies the silence of the images, and of the succession of images. There is something magical in their succession.

Danish Ecopoetics plus Morton

Thank you Olafur Eliasson for pointing this out to me!

Professor Morton, What Are All These Talks Doing on Your Blog All of a Sudden?

Well, the thing is, I did some talks that were adjunct to the Wellek Lectures. And I was waiting until those had been done and unveiled before I put the others together. You'll see that pieces of the Lectures are in those other talks. 

Dark Ecology is such a nice project right now. Graham has been writing about politics a bit recently, and so am I, at this point. One has to give us a bit of a chance, you know. Hard to get everything together all at once, although if you read my stuff a bit you'll see it's quite strongly implicit, and sometimes explicit. It's called anarchy.

The Humanities in the Age of Ecological Emergency (MP3)

Some people go, Morton's hyperobjects come with no easy to identify politics so I don't have to feel anxiety!”

I may have some kind of temporary cure here...

Wondering whether there is a politics with this package of things I keep on about? Look no further. Heavily indebted to the Icelandic Best Party in that respect.

Jón Gnarr, Your Audiobook Is Coming

The Mayor of Reykjavik, about whom I hear many good things, will get his wish for an audiobook of Hyperobjects, courtesy of audible.com. Stand by for more information!

Accelerationist GOP

“The Republican response was predictable: a resounding “we told you so.” All along, they insisted that the ACA wouldn’t work, that it would raise costs — and when reality didn’t match with their scary stories, they took deliberate action to make the bad outcomes they fervently wished for more likely. In the case of the subsidies, which are helping real people get coverage, it took an extensive lawsuit, some friendly judges, and some twisted legal reasoning to undermine them.”

(How different is that, really, in intent, from the idea from the opposite end of things that Obama should have pushed for national health and have it fail, so as not to compromise?)

Even After I Die

My two small people quite surprised that I know "rap." I played this example. "Eternity is holding a rubik's cube..." wow.

Siddhartha Discovers an Entity

“Deep, peaceful, perfectly pure,
luminous, uncompounded, and like nectar
is the Dharma I have obtained.
Even if I were to teach it,
it could not be known by another.
Certainly, I must remain silent in the forest.”    

Lalitavistara Sutra

Realist Magic on Film

In an essay by Amelia Ishmael. Very good seeming journal.

Think Tank

I think John Lydon sums up my feelings about think tanks in general, and this sets the seal on them.

Hypocrisy, Lameness, and Weakness

Cliff writes of that review: 

“It's kinda interesting that "hypocrisy, weakness and lameness" aren't taken seriously as a response to a global cataclysm. They're brushed aside in favor of some flavor of big science and big violence. These are the same sort of criticisms that Occupy faced, and yet they succeeded in changing the national dialogue on income inequality.”

Aha. You see I didn't actually read it...

I guess the only thing I'll say is that if I only had a dollar for every time someone asked, while I was presenting the hyperobjects, “what are we to do?”---a question whose implication was that I had gotten something terribly wrong...

I used to say that hesitation and puzzlement are things to do. They are of course. But now I also “have” “a” “politics” that arises from thinking hyperobjects, so I can talk about that. I can only be thankful to the people of Iceland for these new things to say, which are a great help.