Morton Talks to Artists, Gets Smarter

My buddy Paul Johnson wanted a word that would do for phenomenological "sincerity" or "ingenuousness," so I made one up for him, and I liked it so much I'm gonna use it myself:

SATURATION

It's that quality of always being shrinkwrapped in one's style (not just the clothes obviously!). Like for instance, the attempt to not anthropomorphize is a classic human response to thinking about other lifeforms.

Larry David and John Cleese have built entire careers showing how the escalating attempt to transcend oneself and thereby double down on oneself is intrinsically funny, like someone trying to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Everything you do is saturated with you-ness in the expanded sense. My idea of who I am is a tiny inaccurate sliver. The phenomenological insight that you know me better than I do has now been taken up in neuroscience.

Paul's work is about exploring this saturation too--he calls it supersubjectivity. In a way it's actually hyposubjectivity in my terms: there are more style-parts of you than you.

Style subscends my ego, saturating Tim Morton phenomena.

The artists last night were so good too. One of them convinced me that temporal parts also subscend wholes too. Humankind is a comin!