New Podcast Episode

You'll find it if you go to my Patreon page. I hope you like it. Right now we're donating $850 a month to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. To give you an idea of how the site has been growing, that figure was $300 in December. 

Vsauce Says Hyperobject

 I don't quite know who YouTubers are. Of course I do, but not like my kids do. So I'm not sure quite why they got so excited about this chap talking about my book about four minutes in. But he does appear to have about 17 million followers and this got about 2 million hits when I saw it just now. 

The word hyperobject is great I think, because it makes you feel like a cool scientist. And we need more people feeling that way. 

All Art Is Ecological Final Cover

 Look look! This is the first book that acknowledges my non-binary-ness! 

My Grandfather, My Role Model

 This is a great website about one of the most important political actions in the UK in the early twentieth century, the Cable Street riots. My grandfather, a communist who is my role model, was part of it and talked Marxism on a soap box! They used marbles to deter police horses and they won! I mean the Jews, Communists and anarchists. 

This is the real reason Britain didn't become fascist. And this is the level you have to go to--I use the present tense for a reason. 

My children are now proudly learning about their ancestor... 

George (my grandfather) refused to go on the boat with the other officers to the front (North Africa in his case). He went with the privates. 

The officers' ship was sunk by a U-Boat. 

You are reading this because my grandfather was a communist. 

So, To Recap

 These are the books I'm publishing this year: 

Hyposubjects

All Art Is Ecological

Spacecraft 

...in that order. 

But wait, there's more. I don't know how fast they can do this, but it's quite a short book: 

The Stuff of Life

I'm writing it now. Will be done by June at the latest. 

It's everything you always wanted to know about Tim Morton, without having thought to ask London Underground stations and concealer sticks. 

Very Interesting Interview Last Week

 ...with the director of An Inconvenient Truth (the Al Gore global warming film). Also of ER and NYPD Blue! It was long! As I learn more about his new project I will let you know what is happening. 

When I say long, I mean it was one and a half hours! That's intense...We got to a number of very deep and painful topics. 

I'm Still Mad at Jared Diamond

 ...if you recall, last week he was on a highly propagandistic (worse in a way because this appears acephalic, automated, no one that smart is in charge) radio news show on the BBC. He said that "Anyone who predicted what coronavirus would do last year was lying," which in context gives the British government an out for their terrible policies, and the BBC an out for their terribly damaging both-sidesism: "But what about getting back to work?" "It's so damaging for children to not be in school." "Why can't we have small groups of carol singers at Christmas?" It went on and on and on. 

Science makes predictions. That's what science does. I was arguing that a couple of days ago. Einstein predicted gravity waves. It turns out his prediction was correct and the waveform is the same as he predicted. 

I'm going to go one level deeper here and say science just is prediction. It's the hallmark of science, not a spin-off. It's not that good theories are predictive it is that all scientific facts are predictions. 

Sodium chloride will dissolve when you put it in water. That is a prediction. It keeps happening over and over and over, confirming the prediction. That's how scientific facts work. 

It goes back to Hume: when you say "This billiard ball will hit that billiard ball" you're not having a premonition. Maybe it won't. You can never be sure. You're making a prediction. That's the basis of modern science. Truth is statistical. Not just quantum theory truth, but it's a great example. Every few zillion times your finger will actually go through the wall. 

We rely on scientists to predict things. That's why we pay them and value them. That's exactly why. Because science just is the art of predicting things in as accurate a way as possible. 

Thirty seconds of Diamond talking on that show, on the occasion of the anniversary of the first UK lockdown, has done enormous damage to people's concept of science and their sense of its social role, and their beliefs about the virus. 

New Podcast Marking the Start of the Chauvin Trial

 Join us today and contribute to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund! 

https://www.patreon.com/timothymorton?fan_landing=true

Captain Grief

 I was just interviewed by the creator of An Inconvenient Truth, ER and NYPD Blue. Very intense and fascinating interview. He's creating a project do with our ecological age, another one I mean. 

Where we landed in the interview was thinking about grief. I have been learning a lot more how to grieve throughout 2020. And with coronavirus killing and debilitating and destroying so much, people seem ready for this gigantic life-scale emotion that you can't get on top of, that gets on top of you--which is great, and humbling. 

I'm writing a chapter about it directly in a new book, The Stuff of Life, which you'll hear about a bit more as time goes by. 

In early 2020 I started to feel a lot more directly what I talk about all the time--geotrauma, a newly recognized kind of trauma brought on by global heating and mass extinction. And I started talking about it with  my new friend Caroline Hickman, co-creator of the Climate Therapy Alliance which has worked with Extinction Rebellion Youth and Greta Thunberg. 

And I have been going through a lot of grief--joy and pain and laughing and crying--connected to finding out a whole lot about my gender. 

And my dad died and my lizard died. I've been in such a tunnel since about mid-2018, and if you've been on here for a while, you can see from the way my attending to this blog just started to plummet. 

I was thinking, one reason why Biden is truly effective is, he is Captain Grief. Grief wraps fear, like paper wraps stone. We ended up defeating T**** in part through the political power of grief. 

Comedy includes all the emotions without deleting them. Which also grief does. An interesting loop there. Grief and comedy are phenomenologically like nice healthy habitats where different species of feeling and thought aren't deleting one another. 

Being the most holistic of all emotions, grief is very very good for thinking a holistic aka socialist politics. 

Don't you think? 

Where My Mind Is At

I got this email today, and I think my reply to it might be helpful for you to see where my mind is at. 

Oh, you will also see that the editor is remarking on my non-binary gender identity, so here I am remarking on it officially in my blog. Yes it's true! 

_____

We're publishing an upcoming gloss on and transformative artwork about Hyperobjects/Hyperobjects and a "stubbornly dogmatic" Marxist response to the same. We'd love to know what pronouns you'd prefer in the piece: your Twitter says "she/him," but we're not sure whether that means people should alternate, pick one and stick to it, or use "she" in subject position and "him" in object position. 

*****

Hello—that’s great. When I was writing Hyperobjects, I was abstaining a bit from using words like “socialism” (I am a communist) because sometimes people have strange reactions to it. I was instead trying to give people some of what I take to be the socialist structure of feeling (if I can use Raymond Williama’s term—I’ve been theorizing it recently). 

I was at the time taking very seriously Fredric Jameson’s and Slavoj Zizek’s injunctions for us to do some cognitive mapping of the space in which we find ourselves, before we get on with figuring out exactly how to proceed. 

Since there is very little time left now, for all kinds of reasons, I’m being much more up front about socialism, which I take to be the only way to work realistically with what we have going on in the world. It’s a very strong contrast really between continuing the past, not just in terms of continuing neoliberal capitalism, but the fact that capitalism as such is based on the past because it is in essence algorithmic—or basing our world on the future, aka creativity, aka socialism. 

I was a lot more up front about all this in Humankind, my Verso book, and now I’m trying various ways to be even more direct. 

I regard BLM and MeToo as planet scale collective awareness and action, arriving just in time to work with the crises we have at hand. I regard ending white supremacy and patriarchy as foundational to any socialist project. 

If you could please note that I have started a Patreon podcast series in which I am very directly addressing these issues? All donations go to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. See the link below (and please use it in your description of me). 

And you can use “they.” Thank you for asking. 

PS: The other thing I would very much like you to do is to mention the sequel to this book. It’s a free pdf and it’s called Hyposubjects. It was written by me and my friend the anthropologist Dominic Boyer. He’s a Hegelian Marxist and I’m an OOO Marxist so we thought, instead of squabbling, let’s combine forces. 

You can find it here: 

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/hyposubjects/

It’s very short and it’s been getting a lot of attention recently, it just came out last week. I’m cc’ing Dominic as I’m sure he would be interested in what you’re doing here. The age of the hyperobject is the age of the hyposubject—you’ll see. 

Jared Diamond, You Are Officially DONE

 First you even consented to being on British Pravda aka the BBC, as a propaganda stooge, without realizing it. Or maybe you did. You went on PM, one of the more stupid BBC Radio 4 news shows. A show on which Megyn Kelly had appeared, defending the indefensible, the speech by the ex-President that even made Stephen Colbert weep, genuinely actually weep, the next day, because he saw it for what is was, a coup attempt. You went on that show, two nights ago. 

Then you served their purposes by saying "If anyone predicted that the coronavirus wouldn't be over until July 2021, they were lying." In fact you said if anyone made any predictions, they would be lying. 

PREDICTING IS WHAT SCIENTISTS DO. 

A while back lol Einstein predicted the shape of gravity waves. Then in 2015 they were discovered. They had the waveform Einstein predicted. That is what a scientist does. They predict stuff. 

We want them to. We need them to. We need not to have politicians spouting crap about get back to the plantation of neoliberalism, and we need journalists to pay attention and not go on and on and on about why can't we have Christmas. 

I predicted the coronavirus would last at least until July 2021. Look at my Twitter feed for last year. 

Every epidemiologist said, between one and four years. 

I'm never taking you seriously ever again Diamond. You've just spoken utter nonsense and you've been used as a pawn in the acephalic stupidity that is the BBC propaganda machine. 

PS: How can a prediction be a lie? Like, at all? It confounds logic. 

The Radical Experimental Form of Hyposubjects

 As you will see, and I hope enjoy, Dominic and I wrote this book in a very interesting style. 

My very favorite writer of all time is Virginia Woolf and one thing I love about her is that she lets streams of consciousness bleed into each other. 

So we interviewed one another, transcribed what we said...in such a way that there is never a dramatic script with a dramatic personae...there is no 

DOMINIC: 

TIM: 

...stuff at all. It's all "I...but I...and I..." like "I love ice cream. I hate ice cream. I am indifferent to ice cream, really. I totally agree. I don't agree at all."

We thought this radical experimental style embodied the main topic of the book, which is subscendence. You may have read about this already in Humankind. But we were writing this book before I wrote that one! This is the prequel. It stands in relation to Humankind as Obscured by Clouds stands in relation to The Dark Side the Moon. Only we published this afterwards, mostly on the heels of Black Lives Matter. 

I love Obscured by Clouds. The improvisational feel. The short songs that suggest vastness. Nick Mason really loves it too. 

Hyposubjects Is Out!

 At last, Dominic Boyer and I have published our book. You can download it (for free), or you can buy it. 

As you might be able to tell, it's the sequel to Hyperobjects. 

Past Talks Updating

 ...I promise I'm going to get on it soon! It's been ages. 

Penguin Green Ideas

 "Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement.

 

Here, in twenty short books, Penguin Classics brings you the ideas that have changed the way we think and talk about the living Earth. From art, literature, food and gardening, to technology, economics, politics and ethics, each one deepens our sense of our place in nature; each is a seed from which a bold activism can grow. Together, they show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world."

Very Surprised to Find This Out

 They never told me! But I'm in the Norton Anthology of Theory! I'd been boycotting it for years, because they had nothing in there on ecological criticism. They wrote to me about it about six years ago and I never heard back. Didn't get a desk copy! 

Anyway, here's the citation if you're interested: 

“Introduction: Critical Thinking” (from The Ecological Thought), in Vincent Leitch et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Norton, 2018), 2619–2630. 

Event with Laurie Anderson

 Please register for it, it's free and it's going to be quite a performance. Laurie (my friend!) is hugely adept at masks on Zoom, it's going to be amazing. I'll be helping her out during the performance. 

New Podcast on the Subatomic Structure of Fascism

 I just made it! And you'll find over 8 hours of podcasts if you join over 200 of us donating money to the NAACP lawsuit against the ex-President, his lawyer and two fascist organizations for the fascist coup of January 6! What's not to like?!

Also in this episode, if you're interested, there's an outline of my theory of time and some thoughts on the Anthropocene. 

Mission Statement

 Because of the weather in Houston it wasn't possible for me to prepare for my stint at the wonderful Eyebeam. Hopefully I can be present there soon but I did send them this mission statement: 

interview with the director of Gunda

 I'm very proud of this. It's a beautiful film about, mostly, a pig. 

Docs in Orbit Podcast · Gunda with Victor Kossakovsky