ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: My Talk to the Rice Faculty in mid-Feb

Saturday, February 8, 2014

My Talk to the Rice Faculty in mid-Feb

The Humanities in the Age of Ecological Emergency

Timothy Morton

Humans created the Anthropocene, with its global warming. Not jellyfish. Not fungi. Not coral reefs.

The Humanities know a thing or two about humans.

It is imperative therefore that the Humanities be in the mix of thinking that addresses the Anthropocene. Not as a decorative adjunct to science, but alongside it, fueling it, thinking it, analyzing and critiquing it.

This talk is about that.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: I wish I could be there!
The Humanities are crucial, especially as pseudo-science aligns itself with universities (via big industrial agriculture). We need sharp, critically minded readers to catch & contest the logical fallacies, the obfuscations, and the outright bullshit --all of which simply further human domination and disconnectedness.
Rant over.
Good luck at your talk.; February 9, 2014 at 5:33 PM
"Gallo" said...: Hi Timothy!
I am a phd candidate doing research on community gardens and spatial practices through objects! is this talk recorded anywhere to listen to?
All the best and thanks for your help (via your books)
Cheers
Gab from Brighton; February 22, 2014 at 9:41 AM

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

“Outstanding.”
—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”
—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”
—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”
—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”
—Vince Carducci

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE

Saturday, February 8, 2014

My Talk to the Rice Faculty in mid-Feb

2 comments:

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