coe010_morton.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:25] The sound of crackling electricity means that we're back with the Cultures of Energy podcast Welcome Broadcasting to you! From the basement of Andriod Library at Rice University, sponsored by our Digital Media Commons and our Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences. Sense Cultures of Energy Dawg, we have a doozy of a show for you this week.

Speaker2: [00:00:46] A doozy of a show coming straight out of the digital media commons is also known as the DMC. In local parlance, that's the Demilitarized Zone.

Speaker1: [00:00:57] All right, I don't even know where you're going with that, but OK, this is what we need to talk about. So this episode is bananas at one point in it? Well, first of all, we should say that, first of all, was our guest. Our guest is our beloved colleague, Timothy Morton.

Speaker2: [00:01:14] Doctor Dr. Timothy Dr. Timothy Timothy Morton,

Speaker1: [00:01:17] A man who's written many books, the most recent of which is called Dark Ecology. But you may. You may know him from the ecological thought. You may know him from hyper objects. But we're talking with him about dark ecology. But as it turns out, the conversation takes some interesting twists and turns along the way. And at one point, Simone, I don't want to give away too much, but at one point, Simone begins reading an extensive list of drugs to set him up to explain which of these drugs he might want to put in the groundwater of the one percent. Is that right?

Speaker2: [00:01:51] That's a pretty good representation of it. In other words, you know, it ends up becoming a fairly trippy show. But I think that that's proper because Dr. Timothy Morton is a brilliant but also very trippy person to talk with.

Speaker1: [00:02:05] It sounds like this is a play on Dr. Timothy Leary that you're trying to build up.

Speaker2: [00:02:08] Oh, perhaps. Well, I know.

Speaker1: [00:02:11] Yeah, he is. He is a thinker that that, as we've talked about before, has has a slightly hallucinatory quality to him and reading his work as a slightly hallucinatory effect, sometimes right.

Speaker2: [00:02:21] And in fact, the first question I asked him is how his brain works,

Speaker1: [00:02:24] Which isn't again, an amazing question. And he rolled with that because, you know,

Speaker2: [00:02:29] He well, he laughed about it. But then I was like, Don't laugh at him, you've got to answer that question. So let's not get to

Speaker1: [00:02:37] Do the thing. All right. The thing that was so funny about this, though, is that that list of drugs, which was extensive and and also didn't begin with any of like the drugs I would have imagined you would have to listen. But it started with like these intense like super drugs

Speaker2: [00:02:52] I know well. I wanted to educate some of our younger listeners who might not know about some of these older forms of psychotropics. First of all, I see it as like having an educational purpose. Although, as you pointed out, we are not condoning the use of any sort of either pharmaceutical or organically produced psychotropic compounds.

Speaker1: [00:03:13] Right. The only the only, you know, fully authorized drug of choice for the Cultures of Energy podcast is, in fact, Tim Morton's thinking.

Speaker2: [00:03:22] Yes, Tim Martin's brain.

Speaker1: [00:03:23] Exactly. That's the that's the only drugs

Speaker2: [00:03:25] On our brain, right? So you remember that and Tim Morton remembers this, too. That ad from what was at the 80s or so where the frying the eggs are in the pan and like, This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs. And then they're sizzling and popping. The eggs are that is. So you remember that one?

Speaker1: [00:03:41] I do remember that. But my it was it was crazy. My question for you was, was this a riff on that part of Dolly G show, where he's sitting there with the DEA agent and going over the list of drugs? And he's saying, you know, this one and this one, so these ones are fine, you know, these ones are fine to take, you know, and these ones over here, right? You know, and what do you do with these after you use them? You know, do you give them away to feel ever that

Speaker2: [00:04:06] Right because the DEA agent has all those display drugs? And then he? Well, in the British version, he asked, like, what's the kind of acid that really make you do fly and make you really fly? It's hilarious. It's called dangerous drugs. If anyone wants to look it up, there's a British version and the American version. I think the English one is actually funnier. It's hilarious. But yeah, maybe it was a riff on that. But I was also really honestly trying to provide a robust list of potential drugs to quote dose the one percent with or what we ended up calling the masters of anxiety, right? And so and so, so to dose them with something. And so I wanted to give him lots of latitude to be able to choose his drug of choice, not for himself to imbibe, but actually to give to some of our our wonderful leaders and economic prophets and others who have taken us down this rabbit hole of climate change. And I think it's OK to do. I was trying to give a diversity of different drugs, but the hilarious thing is is I went on and on and it's a very long list. But it wasn't even quite enough for Tim because he actually said, Well, I want to shoot, I want to pick one that you didn't even

Speaker1: [00:05:16] Have to pencil in a couple of names of his own. Meanwhile, if you listen carefully, dear listeners, you'll hear me in the background saying, it's a good thing we all. Of tenure. I think so, which is true. So is there anything else you want to talk about from that before we before we just let it happen?

Speaker2: [00:05:34] I think we should just let it happen. This is a this is a really good conversation. Really lively, happy, smart, interesting, tripped out, intriguing bending and winding and spiral graphic kind of convo with Tim Morton. And I think it's it's a doozy and a good one and maybe one that needs to even be listened to like three or four times. Yes, to get it all.

Speaker1: [00:05:57] Ok, folks. So this is your brain on Tim Morton. So, Timothy Morton, welcome to the Cultures of Energy podcast. Thank you very much for having me. So great to have you here. You have been a stimulus for so many good things since you joined the faculty at Rice, and it's it's it's only fitting that we take this time to talk to you about your really exciting new, almost forthcoming book or it's out already. Yes. Yeah, kind of dark ecology.

Speaker3: [00:06:37] You know, it's funny because I like to think that like beginnings and endings are rather fuzzy and sort of vague, and it's certainly the case with the publication of this book. I mean, I was told that it was going to be out on the 26th of April. Then it suddenly came out at Columbia a few weeks ago, and the official date that I was told a few months ago was April the 1st as it sort of like that. And that, to me, was a perfect date. But in a way, perhaps the whole thing is an elaborate April Fool's joke, including, of course, the book itself. As you will discover, if you, you know, unfortunately, like, read it,

Speaker2: [00:07:09] You know, when you start to page through it, you'll see that this April Fool's Day 2016 conversation with Timothy Morton is, in fact, a very auspicious day. And I have to say it's also a very English day for Houston. It's kind of cool and blustery and wet, and so a really good day to have such a wonderful Englishman or expat Englishman such as

Speaker3: [00:07:29] Yourself, you know? And my friend in the video game, designer Ian Bogost, was just texting me about the fact that he's spontaneously started a queue in Atlanta, and he was feeling very British. So there's something going on in the South right now pertaining to England, and it goes all the way to the it's a hyper object. It goes all the way to Atlanta.

Speaker2: [00:07:48] See, they didn't. They didn't even know that down here in Dixie. Yeah. So the book is out, and that's great. And I assumed it was out because it's sitting here and it's material form. There's an object actually here in our presence and it's got a fantastic cover, which we were just talking about. And the name of the book is dark ecology for a logic of future coexistence. And so, Tim, you probably remember back in the 1980s and 1990s as a way to kind of probe someone's environmental awareness and certain like ecological circles you get, you used to get to ask people, how deep is your ecology? Oh, right? You remember the ecology. Remember that these

Speaker3: [00:08:28] Would play and little phrases for you.

Speaker2: [00:08:31] So now we get to ask. Now we get to ask how dark, how dark is your ecology? And that's like, that's that's a that's a whole

Speaker3: [00:08:39] New world white T-shirt,

Speaker2: [00:08:40] Especially. Yeah. Get ready. So, so in this book, you make what I consider to be a pretty hardcore argument about getting playful and you really forcefully show us with all of the examples that you use, how we need to get more gossamer in terms of how we think about things and how we interact and relate to the world. Or to put it in your terms, we need to get more loopy, loopy in a literal sense and in a figurative sense, but I think actually a literal sense. And so I wanted you to tell us, basically, here's a good question how does your brain work when you're trying to move, when you're just don't laugh. You got you got to answer this question. Got ready. So it's like, you know, how do you move between those bubbles that in that yin yang of the the playful and the but the but also the really, you know, educated, thoughtful argument and position that you make?

Speaker3: [00:09:37] Oh, that's awesome.

Speaker2: [00:09:40] In Part B, to that question, what's up with the toys?

Speaker3: [00:09:42] What's up with the toys? They they? Yeah, yeah. Forceful play. That's my favorite. Yeah. Getting gossamer. That's wow. That's a great alliteration. You got there. So many.

Speaker2: [00:09:53] I like alliteration. Dominic doesn't really like them. I stick. I you know, you got to have your identity. Something that's

Speaker3: [00:09:58] A forum. Autonomy, alliteration, some alliteration, whatever. You know, whatever, whatever gets you through the night, you know. Well. The darkness, it's the funny thing about it is that, you know, it's. Especially right now, we associate dark with things that are very sort of bleak and negative, especially in ecology world, especially in ecology, information delivery world and especially in ecology art world. I'm so sorry to say I was just at the Museum of Fine Art here in Houston doing a panel. And you know, I'm I'm sorry to say that the general kind of tone was very, very negative and very, very miserable. And of course, it is negative and miserable, you see? And and very, very infused with guilt. I'm not sure it has to be infused with guilt, actually, but basically what I saw was a whole bunch of people just traumatizing themselves in various different ways as a means to what I don't know. They all are already as it were believers. And so the phrase preaching to the choir sort of springs to mind. And then you sort of think, Well, maybe they should try to make other people feel miserable to, you know, try and make them feel more guilty. And sort of, how's that working out? Right? It's sort of like how the wrong thing to do when you know someone's mum has died is to slap them upside the head going, your mum died.

Speaker3: [00:11:24] Snap out of your denial. You idiot, you know? And so, you know, maybe this aesthetic, ethical, whatever else tactic isn't actually working and why isn't it working? And it's sort of in the basis of on the grounds of that that I started thinking about dog ecology, you know, and it's very much sort of what I come to the project with a sort of weird yet again pair of trying to triangular little devil horns on my head. You know, in any social situation, probably also even in this room, I somehow volunteer spontaneously for the position of the devil. It's a sort of scapegoat position, you know, in any group of whatever sides, there's usually a little sign invisible that says Scapegoat wanted. Apply here, and I'm more like donkey in Shrek. So pick me, pick me sort of jumping up and down like that. And so, you know, I end up saying the unacceptable thing or it's awful, really, I'm the devil. So I sort of said I came on at the end and I was actually so overwhelmed and actually cross feeling with the energy.

Speaker3: [00:12:29] And then I realized, Oh, Tim, that's why you're here. So you and I sit up at the end. And so I said, You know, why are we doing this to ourselves actually right? And you know, this is the thing I feel like. What needs to start happening, what will start happening, actually as we enter an ecological era is that things actually become more playful. Let me give you a very, very brief, simple example. And then like, I'll talk about what kind of play because that was part of your question, Simone. I recently switched to all wind power in my house. It's easy to do, although it's funny that when you go on the energy company's website, I'm looking at you, TXU. You don't see it as an option when you click it. It's all your house can't do that. So I phoned them up and I got it done by phone. Whether it's whether that's a glitch or a sort of devious thing, I don't, I'm not quite sure. So anyway, my house is powered by wind and I felt for two days extremely righteous and pure and holy and clean and efficient. And how fabulous this is that I'm all being all ecological.

Speaker2: [00:13:38] And were you turning on every hairdresser, hair dryer?

Speaker3: [00:13:42] No, because see, that's the thing that on day three, I suddenly had the actual ecological realization I feel, which is, oh, every room in my house could be a different disco, right with like strobes and like dry ice and decks and like pounding sounds, lights, you know, right? And no life forms would be harmed. Right? Sort of, you know, vanishingly less than in an oil economy.

Speaker2: [00:14:09] Yeah, totally right. And I'm sure you'd have a lot of humans who'd like to come over and take advantage of that. Well, exactly. You know,

Speaker3: [00:14:17] You never know there's a couple of Roombas and maybe some turtles that like in as well on this disco scene. But really, it's something that is plaguing the way we talk to ourselves about this right now is that it is in fact. And you know, let's just cut to the chase super super saturated with this thing that I would think of as a hyper object, which is your basic oil economy, including your basic oil. Like, we think about this in oil mode and it's like oil mode is the problem. So let's not think that way, right? So dark doesn't mean, oh god, it sort of means that at first, right? But you find you eventually you find the sort of sweet, dark chocolate bit in the middle of that right inside there. But then you sort of to get there, you transition through another kind of dark, which is this sort of slightly weird, twisty, dark, loopy, dark, right? And that's the sort of crazy Dungeons and Dragons map of ecological awareness that I've somehow constructed at the end of this book. Oh my God. And so, you know, what kind of playful world are we talking about here? Are we talking again about a sort of Google world of serious playfulness where you will have fun in five four three? Otherwise I'm going to fire you? One How fun now that kind of control society and we all know that ecology world could be the ultimate control society, you know, which wouldn't be great in that sense.

Speaker3: [00:15:45] I'm not an ecological person at all. It's sort of like my weird new shtick, you know, is that that's if that's what ecology is, then beam me up, Scotty, you know, then we've got the other alternative, which is playful seriousness. In other words, the the light tactical deployment of sincere, thoughtful, good creative stuff right in play mode, right, rather than in serious play mode that I'm interested in. It's the mode, right. It's sort of like what people in my neck of the scholarship woods do is emphasize and talk about how important the mode is in which the idea or whatever it is, the praxis, whatever is being thought, done, held, ignored, brushed against Licht. I don't know, just sort of everything, right? And so that's the kind of play

Speaker2: [00:16:35] Does that sort of kind of it's kind of a sandbox in a way. You get in there and it's granular and you can invite people in and and other non-human zen and all kinds of stuff and toys, too.

Speaker3: [00:16:47] Right. And so toys are sort of everything is a toy. That's that's my, you know, that's my and that's my final offer. That's sort of like my ontology reduced to just one sentence. Everything is a toy by which I mean that everything is intrinsically a little bit broken and that this means in the end, that. From a certain kind of point of view, everything is a little bit funny because everything is being itself, even when it's deviating from itself, and that's kind of a pretty good definition of what happens to Charlie Chaplin when he's trying to walk across the street. Right? Or what happens in Curb Your Enthusiasm? You know where there's this amazing DNA spiral of trying to be very serious? And yet, of course, that produces the ultimate humor, right? So somehow, like that fact about things is very deep to me and means that things are inherently playful, right? So that, you know, it's not just that, you know, other things than humans can play. I mean, we sort of know this, right? And we know this from cats, right? Like cats, except that the law of non contradiction can be defied sometimes because they've nip you. And when they nip you, they basically are saying, and I agree with Bates and this is about and this is not a bite at the same time, right? But it's not just that.

Speaker3: [00:18:09] It's the fact that intrinsically onto logically, in other words, having to do with how things are right rather than having to do with what things are in the world actually like. There's a great big sponge and then there's a little blue ball and that's it. And we're all just like emanations of that, whatever. So, yeah, a toy, it's a deep category, right? And so somehow to me, what ecological awareness reveals is that things have this toy like quality. Okay, so if a thing is a toy, then also a political format, if it is a thing, it's also a toy. Right. And so politics has to be about seriously playing with these toys that are necessarily a little bit broken. And so therefore they can't be a one size fits all sort of political umbrella under which everything is sitting right, which is disappointing to some people, you know, but you know. Um, insert cliche here that would make that thing about being disappointed into a semi amusing witticism.

Speaker1: [00:19:08] All right. We'll insert that in post. How about that? Ok, Tim, there's a lot of great moments in this book and I I want I want to ask you to tell us how you learn to stop worrying and love the Anthropocene, the term Anthropocene. And let me let me let me contact that a little bit by saying one of the big reveals in this book. For people who have followed the debates, some of them quite, you know, lively around object oriented ontology. Or Ooh or ooh, can I just call it anything you want, baby? Is that you reveal here? Newsflash that you, in fact, are or identify in the book, perhaps playfully, perhaps seriously, as a correlation test. Mm hmm. And so I felt, you know, a tremor through the force at that moment. Oh, and I was just curious if you could talk about that a little bit. Also, maybe for people who aren't exactly sure what correlation ism is or what the stakes of this whole debate about where you are now in this and how it relates to the Anthropocene. Sure.

Speaker3: [00:20:16] Ok. Well. Oh gosh. Huge questions are brilliant. So, OK, you can relax about the correlation isn't bad, actually, because funnily enough, object oriented ontology is in fact a form of correlation ism. It's just that it's not your granddaddy's correlation ism.

Speaker1: [00:20:34] We're trying to get sound effects in here now, but

Speaker3: [00:20:36] You

Speaker1: [00:20:37] Simply did a simple machine

Speaker3: [00:20:39] Or the snare drum. Yeah, yeah, I see. Yeah, yeah. Enormous flash of lightning or something or a kind of clown car. So it's always just the right sound effect for that kind of revelation. Oh, rubber chicken. Yeah, Rubber Chicken hitting the ceiling. That's right. Exactly. That's this is this is where the rubber chicken hits the ceiling, ladies and gentlemen right here. So, so you know. Gosh, that was quite amazing, and I've never forgotten that.

Speaker1: [00:21:08] You said that object oriented ontology is a form of correlation, right? But not your granddaddy is correlation.

Speaker3: [00:21:14] There's two schools of thought about this correlation or something. But first of all, we need to know what this correlation isand thing is. Correlation ism is basically the sort of contemporary going for the last 200 years. Cool kid in the West way of talking about things, right? The previous way of talking about things was to say rather uncomplicated. Oh, there are things. Look, you can see them and you can touch them, and they're decorated with these colors and patterns and you can measure them. And everything's good, right? In various different ways. Like there's the Spinoza way of saying it. You know, there's just one thing and there's the Descartes way of saying it. There's two things there's extensional stuff. And then there's mind, right? And lots of different ways of saying it, right? There's Atom ism, you know, everything is a flow. You know, the Heraclitus, right? There's loads of different ways of doing that, right? Very popular in the Middle Ages was near platonic sort of Christian version, right? So we've got this kind of mind body duality from that. Pretty much. Then along comes David Hume and David Hume basically blows all that out by saying you just aren't going to ever really see the wiring under the board, all you're actually going to see are patterns in data. That's basically what he's talking about. He's saying science is the search for patterns in data, right? Not being able to peer under the hood of how things appear to the actual sort of workings underneath. And then along comes Immanuel Kant to sort of explain why. And it's sort of like, well, actually, funnily enough, this idea that there are these workings underneath is the sort of part of the problem.

Speaker3: [00:22:42] Actually, what's really going on is that you get to make things real, you know, and sort of like, that's permeated our culture. Now, if you just think of a movie like what in the bleep do we know that kind of new age thought is extremely correlation est right? It's sort of all over. If you think about quantum theory, where the going ontology is that there is no ontology, that there is no quantum realm, it's all just an effect of measurement. That is exactly saying what this is saying. This is saying that you can't actually know the thing in itself. What you can know are data and patterns in data right now. Who's the you right? It depends on what philosopher you're looking at like. For Kant, it's the transcendental subject for Hegel. It's. What he's calling Geist, but basically the the upwardly moving slinky of human history, you know, culminating in surprise, surprise drum roll sound effect Hagel in in Russia in the first decade of the 19th century. I love, I think Dominic and I have talked about this before, but I'm just going to say I love micro Hagel. I love all the little tools that you can take out of Hagel and use in a more playful way, right? But this idea that the slinky goes upwards and the idea that it goes up the stairs and that there is a top of the staircase, all that stuff or the macro Hagel delete, right?

Speaker2: [00:23:59] You let the toy,

Speaker3: [00:24:00] The micro Hagel, the mike, the little bits of Hagel. Awesome, awesome tools, beautiful soul. Totally down with that dialectical whatever's. Totally down with that in my way. Right? So that's correlation is an awful Mark's right. It's not really real until you've put it into a human economic system, right? Like, OK, there's a potato, but it's not really a potato until you've made it into like a French fry and like, sold it at McDonald's or whatever. You know, that's use value, right? That's like it's real because it's useful, has use value because we are, you know, putting it into circulation in a human economic relation sort of set up right? Nature will to power makes things real. Heidegger, it's Dustin. Makes things real, right? Which basically equates to human beings and in the end, to German human beings because they for somehow make things much more real than everybody else just by being German, right? Okay, right. So like two thoughts about that, the first thought is, this is all bad and we need to pop out of it right now. That's here, Mayor. So that's your brassiere. That's your basic other types of speculative realism right there. Right? And they think, Oh, it can be done. We, on the other hand, the object oriented people think, actually, that's what you can't do. You find yourself popping out and what the world they pop out to out into. Actually, it's like math world. It's like, Oh, tell me something I didn't know.

Speaker3: [00:25:22] Things are basically extensional lumps. I mean, we sort of knew that already, like in a before can't like, could we not be regressing here? So like, it's not the correlation ism that. That's the problem. It's the copyright control on who gets to do the correlating. It's the Anthropocene centrism of the correlation ism, right? So, for example, just take a very sort of. Example from here in the room, right, I'm talking into this microphone using the mic, and in a sense, you could say that anthropomorphizing the mic because I'm appropriating it for my human needs, because I'm being interviewed by Simone and so on and so on. That's cool. I sort of can't help doing that from this point of view, even when I'm intending not to. There I am with my hands and the rest of my body actually doing that in my voice, right? Or maybe thinking that I don't have to, or choosing not to, or thinking that I can intern not is precisely the kind of thing that anthropomorphize this stuff. That's the kind of thing that humans like to do. Right? So you sort of can't get out of that one. Luckily, though, the Mike is Mike pur- more fighting my voice, it's Mike amortizing my hand, it's doing the same thing. And furthermore, the mike is Mike Moore facing the table and the tables table, Paramore fighting the mike right and the wires wiper, Moore facing the table and the mike and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Speaker3: [00:26:39] Right? Sort of like, OK, everything gets to be that right. And so somehow what we've actually missed is the sort of it's like the thing side of this equation, like, OK, so there are things and then there's data we've gone too far into. Oh, there's just data we just get to make everything real. We end up with like George Bush and we end up with this sort of press conference in 2005 where he, his his associate, basically says, what we do in this administration is create realities, you know, and you guys study them. He's talking to journalists, but he might as well be talking to social scientists and humanists, and you'll study them according to your own parameters, as you will. But by the time you finished studying them, we will have created another reality for you to study. And I just thought, Wow, that's just like the most sinister thing I think I've ever heard in my life, right? And so like, maybe we could not have this sinister thing that we've ever heard in our life be like driving how we do the philosophy right? And so like, OK data. But then like. Two things even measurable illness is data right from from this point of view, measuring something. And all mathematician ing it right is just as good or bad as like licking it or ignoring it or drinking it or making a little model out of it or or throwing it onto the ceiling, you know, or shooting it around a particle accelerator or right.

Speaker3: [00:28:04] There's nothing special about knowing, right? That's something about some forms of speculative realism is that they're basically saying there's something very special about knowing things that make that it's really different from everything else. And we're sort of calling that epistemic him right now because we sort of think, you know, what about some poor turtle that like walks over it? Whatever it is, isn't that like accessing it in some way, right? Turtle paw more facing it, right? So sort of like this is good for for ecological stuff, right? Because then you don't really have to prove all the time that, you know, turtles are just like humans and humans are just like humans because we have a self-concept, because we possess ourselves, because we have this private property that gives us the right to destroy it, you know, all this kind of stuff, right? It's all based on that sort of wrong mind body duality, right? And you know, we don't need to say, Oh, then that thing can have rights, you know, because that and that's what an incredible limit to it, right? I mean, it's temporarily quite a good idea to maybe like try desperately to persuade some jury to get some chimp out of the jail, call a zoo, right? But like in the long run, like if everything is given rights, then sort of like nothing has rights because like rights is based on some idea of property.

Speaker3: [00:29:10] And if nothing can be property, then nothing can have rights. So like, something's always going to be left out right and sort of like, this is the problem with the correlation ism that we've received. It's like it was bad when Western people thought that things were like just plastic lumps that they could manipulate. It will. Right now, we even think that things are like just blank screens for human desire projection purposes. Right? And it's like, No, no, no. So for example, let's take structural ism. I was thinking about this, the idea that language is cutting into a continuum, right? Or this sort of body version of that like like the event is a radical cut into a continuum, right? No, it's not. It's a cut into Simone, and it's a cut into this chair and it's a cut into this room and it's a cut into this carpet and it's like light. Let's add all these things, all these discrete details back instead of this sort of amazing kind of look at me, I can do stuff. I'm Harold and the Purple Crayon, you know, I and I get to decide what events are, even because I've got the copyright on who gets to do that out of the humans as well. Sorry, just being a bit, you know, I can't help but see on the devil.

Speaker3: [00:30:15] What can I say on the devil? So Anthropocene, right? Anthropocene Anthropocene is the thing. But we have data about it, right, so we can't really directly see it and what are we actually also seeing? We're seeing the human species right. Let's go there. Let's talk about, Oh my god, I can't believe I'm going to say this phrase the Anthropocene of the Anthropocene, because I want to make one of those memes with Samuel Jackson going, say, Anthropocene of the Anthropocene one more time. The human species. Right, humans as a species. The problem with this concept is that we've been thinking it's something that you can actually point to and that's called racism or species ism or something like that, right? All patriarchy, right? Everybody's a man. Look, it's completely obvious, and some of them are women, which is like, sort of deviant man. But we'll just sort of try to forget about that. But that kind of thing. I don't have an accent. You know, I'm I'm I'm white, which means I don't have a color, all that kind of stuff, right? That's what happens in our heads as humanists when we hear the word species right, that's what happens. We say, Oh my God, some pre 17, whatever pre Kantian concept that you can actually directly point to things, right? And sort of that's like, what's wrong with our world? And can't we just like admit that everything is discursive, fully constructed? Yes.

Speaker3: [00:31:34] Fantastic. Let's do that. Also, let's admit that the that this rather nice orange plastic glass, it's also discursive, constructing me at the same time, right? So somehow, Anthropocene can't mean finally, we can be the kind of essentialist that our granddaddies were, and that literary theory and other classes taught us not to be right, on the other hand. That's kind of hamstrung us in terms of actually talking about this stuff because we don't have the way to say human species without some immense sort of deletion censorship of that concept, right? And so what we need is a kind of essentialism, but it's not your granddaddies essentialism. We need to be able to say, OK, there's the human species, but it's real insofar as you can't point to it, which seems quite sort of logical from a Kantian point of view, which is basically the sort of point of view, right? Things are real insofar as you can't access them, right? They're not real because you can point to them. They're real because you can't point to them, can't point to it. It might be real. That's a little like the question, right? They has a weird gap between what it is and how it appears. It's probably real. You know, I feel like if there was an object oriented way of probing whether things were real or not, it would involve ambiguity. Like when you're at the optometrist, right? And the doctor is like they break it down to like a prescription that's like very accurate and another one that's very accurate.

Speaker3: [00:33:03] And they're swapping the lenses around, usually by hand at this point. And they go, is it number one or number two? Is the number one or number two? And you're like, Oh, I'm beep beep beep. If I know, like no one is quite good, then this way and then in another micro, different way, number two is pretty good as well. Oh, I can't tell. It's profoundly ambiguous. It's not indeterminate or vague. It's ambiguous. Do you know what that is? That's a sign of an accurate prescription, because at that point, it doesn't matter which one you choose, you're going to get an awesome pair of glasses, right? So maybe ambiguity could be a signal of reality light. Like most a lot of Western philosophers like let's delete the ambiguity. Let's try to get rid of that. Then we'll really know what things are, you know, and I see this as like a symptom of a massive sort of agricultural project that has resulted in the Anthropocene, you know, like a light like as a key component of that. Actually, it's ambiguity deletion, you know, and in an ecological era, ambiguity tolerance is going to be very important. This is another shout-out to social sciences and humanities, because what I feel like, what we're doing is ambiguity tolerance training right? And everyone has a certain threshold, right? Because if you were completely tolerant, you'd probably be some enormous cloud of sort of transcendental vapor that was everywhere at all times and all places simultaneously or something like that.

Speaker3: [00:34:19] And that can't be true. But so somehow I feel like Anthropocene is actually about suddenly realizing that we're humans. It's like the sort of dialectical like, Oh gosh, wow. Through this negation, we've suddenly realized we're humans, and what a horrifying negation it is because we're talking again. You know, this is not a cut into a continuum. This is actually making life forms extinct in a way that we haven't seen since the fifth mass extinction, right? Which I think if memory serves was no, that was the asteroid the fifth one, but the fourth one. The end-Permian, I believe, was caused by global warming, right? So like we are now that force we are now, that force that is making all these lifeforms extinct and like, it's really good to like, know that and like to think about it and sort of start to chew it instead of like. So to trying to disavow it or kind of like push it away or sort of carry on like everything sort of normal, you know, we've been done a sort of horrible upside down favor by this destructiveness that we've done, which is that we've become aware of the radical limit on that on that project, right? And so somehow that's the that's what Anthropocene means to me.

Speaker2: [00:35:36] Well, it's a it's a big question. It's a big topic. It's everything essentially. So I mean, I think it's deserving of several words and and you gave us a lot of good ones. I like this idea too of, you know, you were talking about ambiguity and what do they call the diopter? Is that what they call those little squishy lenses going back and forth? So when when the optometrist is trying to fix that, so ambiguity is reality. It's like finding that that prescription. But also in that sense, ambiguity is perfection, right? The ambiguous is kind of not just the real, but it's it's perfection. Wow. So now, Tim, I'd like to talk about drugs. Ok, OK.

Speaker3: [00:36:17] My second favorite topic?

Speaker2: [00:36:19] Well, I figured we might as well go there. We already hit

Speaker3: [00:36:22] Forceful play and drugs. Maybe drugs. And then who knows how the night will develop?

Speaker2: [00:36:27] So but we're not just going to, we're not just going to, you know, leave you hanging to just kind of riff on drugs, although I'm sure that that would be a very, very wonderful riff. But actually, I want to set it up a little bit. So as we all know, you cannot go into the media sphere these days without hearing about the heroin epidemic and the abuse of prescription painkillers and opiates and et cetera. Ok, so this is a little bit of setup, but but but before we go, before we start doing drugs here, I want to read a little something from the book to kind of set it up a bit. So this is from the third thread. And so you start out, you say I've been kicked in the biosphere. We live in a reality determined by a one size fits all window of time, a window determined by some humans attempts to master their anxieties about sustenance as agro logistic axiom number three states the logics. The logistics of this time window imply that existing is better than any quality of existing. So it's always better to have billions of people living near to misery than even millions living in a state of permanent ecstasy. Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing Bing. Because of this logic, industrial machines were created. The small, rigid time tunnel now engulfs a vast amount of Earth's surface and is directly responsible for much global warming. It's a depressive solution to anxiety your attention down to about a year, maybe five years.

Speaker2: [00:37:57] If you really plan, quote ahead. One of the most awful things about depression is that your time window collapses to a diameter of a few minutes into the past and a few minutes into the future. Your intellect is literally killing little you by trying to survive like a violent allergic reaction or spraying pesticides. We live in a world of objectified depression. Hmm. So I wanted to not necessarily talk about antidepressants. I want to talk about real drugs. And I want to go back to this idea of what you what you call hear some humans attempts to master their anxieties about sustenance. So I'm going to call them the masters of anxiety. And I think they are in a sense, you know, the deciders, as Bush would have called them, the one percenters. Those humans who have an inordinate amount of control of and possession of policies and economic forces to make things happen in the world in ways that some of the rest of us cannot. And so I wanted to ask you if you could put something in the water for those folks or maybe for all of us folks, what what would that be? Now there's a lot of drugs out there, so I'm going to just I'm going to give us just a little tasting menu because we don't want to be overly indulgent. So let's start with this one. Fentanyl, this is a this is a newbie. It's a synthetic heroin 50 times to 100 times stronger.

Speaker2: [00:39:28] People are using it to kind of top up heroin, and it's killing off a bunch of people. Then there's also good old fashioned heroin like the the William S. Variety or what they like to call here or down in the south heroin. I like that. One friend described that to me once as it makes you feel like God. And in the one instance you think, Wow, that sounds pretty good. And on the other hand, you think, shit, do I want to have the world on my shoulders? That's a lot of fucking responsibility, right? How about MDMA? That's a good one. Ecstasy, you even refer to ecstasy in this passage. When that first came out, they called it. They called it E. They called it X. Hmm. That's just that gooey high. That happy. That good happy. Feel it until you come down. Then there's MDA, the businessman's acid, right, where you're basically tripping balls, your high as hell, you're hallucinating for like 20 minutes and then all of a sudden, poof, it's over and it's gone. Cocaine. Let's ask Rick James about that, nuff said. We all know what that one is. How about speedy crystal meth, tweaker magic? Or if we want to go back to some romanticised roots? How about opium in those sweet, smoky rooms? So the question is what? What should we be dosing ourselves with now? Oh, Dr. Timothy Morton of two or more? What should we dose those? Those other, those managers, those those masters of anxiety?

Speaker3: [00:40:55] Oh gosh, I'm so glad you want to dose the most anxiety because they should be included. You see, in part of the trouble, of course, with a lot of ecological speech is that we end up, quite rightly, somebody did this right and quite accurately, it's mostly western white patriarchy that did this. So on the other hand, sort of turning this into, let's actually spend all of our time pointing the finger. All of our time like pointing the guilt finger. That way, when there's something about ecological action that actually implicates everybody all the time in a very peculiar way in in some way might not be ecological ethics and politics. In the end, that might be a sort of puritanism retweet where there's a sort of evil fascination with evil. Let's put it that way, which might in itself be a symptom of monotheism, which might in itself be a symptom of agricultural age, religion which might in itself be a symptom of the problem, right? So that might not be that might be okay to do for like five minutes. But then we all need to, like take some drugs or something. So actually, interestingly, there was one you didn't mention, which is the good old LSD, and I'm going to make a proposal here that we give everybody what in the early 90s was called the specialist. Now this is a cocktail. Why do you know about these things, Professor Morton? Well, it's a little bit to remember.

Speaker2: [00:42:29] Get out, get out, get out your pen

Speaker3: [00:42:30] Participant, observation, participant, observation, participant observation. It was reputed. That around 1991, which is a great year for techno, that the best thing to do was an ecstasy tablet, MDMA, and then about two or three hours in to take a tub of acid, right, so that the trip would be sort of supported by, as you were saying, the sort of fuzzy, gooey pink billowing cloud of happiness, you know, created by this absolutely outrageous SSRI dumping all this serotonin into your brain, right or causing your brain to dump all the serotonin into itself. So what does that mean in in in in layman's terms or non layman's terms, what does that mean? That sort of means the. One of the crucial things that needs to happen is that and this is going to sound horribly new agey, there's no other way to say it really is is something like getting back into your body. I feel like in a way that isn't just I'm going to become a sort of metallic version of myself, but has to do with something like what is often called yoga and in some cultures is called Prana, Nardi and Bindu. And I want to say these words on the radio in a university because I'm trying to make the world a safe space to say words like pro-ana without being deleted. You know, we can say mindfulness right in school now, and it's OK to sort of say that, but you still can't say prana. You still can't say subtle body said.

Speaker3: [00:44:06] Oh, that's just a cuckoo idea. Of course, we all know that really its mind and body. And really, we know that there's this thing in side us like a kind of invisible gas, and it's sort of like an emergent property of our brain or something. So it's like it doesn't really exist in the same way as the extensional stuff. It's like, Oh my god, we're still retweeting Descartes, who was still retweeting near platonic Christianity, which blah blah blah monotheism, blah blah blah agricultural age, religion, blah blah blah blah blah. Right? So, you know, ecstasy would mean allowing something like that to exist, allowing some kind of ambiguous spectral sort of into space between the categories mind and body to be something that was real, which would also be equivalent to something like, in a way, eco therapy, which has become actually a very big thing on the West Coast at this point, where people are beginning to realize that there's a deep, deep trauma from suffering our connection to non-human beings, you see, because of course, the point is you already have non-human beings to keep you alive all the time. They're your microbiome and so on and so on. Let's not even think about dogs and cats and horses and blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah. Right. And mitochondria and viral code insertions in our DNA. Right. But we keep telling ourselves over and over and over again, we don't have any connection to anything.

Speaker3: [00:45:19] We came from ourselves. We have autochthonous origins and blah blah blah blah blah. It's so obvious to me that that whole Levi-Strauss idea like, Oh, did we come from ourselves or did we come from somewhere else? And that's what makes everybody sort of. So it's so obvious that you came out of a vagina. You know, so I mean, that's the most obvious thing ever. And like so ecological awareness is like default and then thinking that you somehow pulled yourself out of your own head like a sort of patriarchal rabbit out of your sort of a hat like Athena, coming out of Lucy's head is obviously whack. Right? It's obvious, but you keep having to tell yourself precisely because it's whack, right? And so you keep retraumatizing yourself. And not only are you telling yourself, but you're actually enacting that in social space, right? So you're creating these massive walls between human world and non-human world, and woe betide any non-humans that come into that world that aren't already something like your cattle or who have been highly trained before agriculture showed up like dogs. I'm thinking about cats, right? Derrida says. There is no outside text, right? And that's actually my favorite translation. The other one on Page 158, have of grammar theology. Spevack translations. He's actually translating it right now is there is nothing outside the text, and people have taken this to mean, Oh, everything's made of language. It doesn't mean that it means that you can't stop contextualizing stuff and that there's a very ambiguous boundary between the text and the context, which is precisely how ecological awareness looks in sort of human sciences and scholarship world.

Speaker3: [00:46:45] Actually, you can't do don't know where the contextualization explosion can stop, right? So there is no outside text now. Also, of course, I've and I've been taking to saying this recently, there is no outside cat, right? There is no such thing as an outside cat. You have the an idea. I mean, I'm not passing on people who let their cats go outside here, but it's the idea that the cat is outside. That's kind of strangely sort of like buttressing your idea that you're inside, inside what? Inside social space, which is human right and over there must be outside. There is nature. It's like, you know, this is the cat's job is to kind of confirm this myth. Of course, it isn't nature. It's Iraq for cats, right? It's a war zone against non-human beings, right? And we have this thing called a car, which was never designed with a non-human beings in mind. I mean, it's completely anthropocentric scaled object right on your cat goes outside and it gets run over. And I'm being very biographic, autobiographical here, and it's in the book, right? And so there is no outside cat, right? Non-human beings are already in social space, but social space is not wired for only a bit of, you know, for most non-human beings, right? I'll stop there.

Speaker1: [00:48:00] And I'll start. I wanted to to to ask and this is sort of flipping ahead towards the end of the book into the into the third thread and into the ending before the beginning. Where you talk about. You know how dark ecology begins in darkness as depression? And you also talk about the way we find our pathway towards what you're calling the joy. Mm-hmm. Hmm. Um, and I'll just I'll read a little bit. When you're funny, it means that you allow the irreducible gap between what you are and who you think you are to manifest without tampering with it when you were successfully funny. It means you allow people to see you being that living that gap. You are radically accepting your finitude. And you know. Is there a way in which and I won't say, because I think you've been talking about being taken as a devil, but but sometimes it seems to me what you're trying to do more is is to is to embody some somewhere between an oracle and a clown that's allowing you to sort of in in a playful way, be able to help prompt us to think about or to channel that spirit of ecological awareness, that that is what we all hope is is growing and emergent in the world.

Speaker1: [00:49:28] But we often find is still just, you know, kind of only thriving on the margins of, you know, the masters of anxiety if you want to call them that. And I'm when you first gave a paper, this actually the first paper I ever heard you give and it was called dark ecology, and it was at the seventh symposium a few years ago. And what a performance it was. It was terrific. And I remember in the Q&A afterward, because you hadn't contextualize this at all, you just jumped into it and you and you did your performance. And then the Q&A, you had a moment that I remember, which was really thoughtful where you said, you know, in a way, maybe dark ecology is deep ecology undercover. It's a different way of getting back to the deep ecology, but through through playfulness, through irreverence, through erudition. Obviously, a lot of. So I don't know if you want to talk a bit about that, about your own method.

Speaker3: [00:50:20] Yeah, we'd love to. But first of all, I need to give the asset to the masters of anxiety, right? Like, we've relaxed them, you know, with something like an experience of beauty. Right. We've we've relaxed them. It's something like a kind of mind meld with something that isn't exactly them. That's functionally equivalent to realizing that you're not alone in this world, right? Which then, you know, might end up with you noticing other entities, you know, such as like. People who don't have a job and lions that you think you might like to shoot but have decided not to because you just took this ecstasy tablet and then you take the acid and you look at the lion and you go, Oh my gosh, this isn't. This is not my beautiful lion. Like, it's totally different for me, and it's got this very strange quality of like having more of itself than itself all the time and like this experience of beauty that I'm having. It's actually not stable and it's like, I'm looking at this bag full of eyes and each eye in the bag full of eyes turns out to be another little bag full of eyes. And oh my gosh, there's a sort of weird, disgusting, infinite, regressive of like thingies within thingies, within thingies pouring out of everything. Oh my god, I'm dripping, right? The philosophical term for tripping, ladies and gentlemen, is substance. Yeah, right, so like. Yeah, clown profit clown, like, like, OK, let's talk about it.

Speaker3: [00:51:52] You've achieved once you've done this kind of social psychic philosophical equivalent of the specialist, you've achieved some kind of First Peoples like access to things is what I would like to be arguing here that actually that the good news is that we haven't ever left the Paleolithic right. So, you know, philosophy tends to want to leave the Paleolithic because philosophy tends to want to be axial age, religion 2.0 this time without needing to believe stuff, right? And so like, it actually just sort of ramps up and reboots and upgrades and updates in an irritating way, like the new iPhone software, the original idea, right? And so like when you look at previous versions of agri logistics, you get all sort of fanciful light. When you look at Stonehenge, for example, it's like, Oh, look, they believed in goddesses in those days, you know, and as rigorous as even the mother goddess is kind of wag from this point of view, right? So like, we somehow keep telling ourselves that we couldn't possibly go there, right? And so how can you like convince people that not only can you go there, but actually you don't even need to go there, you're there already and you're there now because you have all this sort of scientific data that's telling you that everything is profoundly ambiguous and you can't point to it. You know, in the very place where you thought you'd achieved escape velocity from the dream time, there's the most dream tiny bit.

Speaker3: [00:53:15] That's funny, right? From this point of view, it's it's, you know, so ecological awareness is tragic at first. You discover that you're holding this knife and that you're the murderer and all that kind of thing. But then eventually it sort of it needs to be kind of it needs to laugh. It needs to start laughing, right? Even if it's about going through a grief process where you can't really cry until you've actually laughed, like you can cry for real after you smile, somehow, that's like a sort of natural progression somehow. So sort of like Socrates describes himself as a clown, right? He describes himself as somebody who doesn't know anything, and I think that's a great bit about him and me and the other. Another object oriented philosopher, Graham Harman, are asking ourselves now what if he actually is telling the absolute truth there? Like, he's not just putting it on as a front, like, Oh, I don't know anything like Columbo, like, Oh, I just I don't really know anything, you know, I just have one more question just irritate the guy he's talking to is so his head explodes. It's obviously like something about that in a Socratic dialogue where the guy is just like Socrates isn't a doesn't have a blog. He's like a commenter on other people's blogs. He'd say, Oh, there's a very interesting blog post, but could you clarify this thing for me? Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, cool. But like, you're still only giving me an example of justice.

Speaker3: [00:54:28] You know, why don't you actually told me the real thing? Oh, well, la la la la la la la la la. And that goes through several iterations. And finally, Minos head explodes and at the end of the dialogue, right? But what if Socrates is, you know, above and beyond that sort of performance actually saying the truth? I don't know anything, right? Maybe not knowing anything with a capital K is also equivalent to, I think. As much as possible, right, I think everything right, and I think and I think I think therefore I I think therefore I agree with John Garner. John and I have had a conversation about how comedy is the same as thinking right? Like having an idea is the same thing as getting a joke. It's exactly the same, right? Writing prose is exactly like doing stand up somehow like you can. You're controlling time. You can you're sort of working with a tuning to your audience, right? And then from there, like playing with that audience and playing with the energy so that you're not deleting it, but you're sort of using it to elicit insights that are already there. But they are in the future of the person who's reading the book like, why the hell do you buy a book anyway? Right? Like, you buy a book so you can be amazed. You're like, I won't buy these dumplings because I'd rather be amazed than full kind of thing that's sort of like that, right? So you pay 15 bucks if your hard earned cash money to be slightly surprised.

Speaker3: [00:55:50] And so the point is. Knowing nothing, really knowing nothing means I'm open to the future, right? So somehow, like clown and profit sort of go together if a profit isn't some pompous guy who like tells you what's going to happen, which is, wow, that would be unbelievable. But like, rather like somebody who's like attuned to not just predictable future possibilities, but to the fact of future nurse, we could call it future reality at all, right? And so like, not knowing anything might mean having the wiggle room to think more. Yeah. And somehow, to me, the philos bit of philosophy is the key bit, right? Because it's the love of wisdom, right? And when you love somebody, you have no idea who they are, like, who are you like? I keep waking up next to you and stranger and stranger every day, you know? And like, how the hell do you stay waking up with me, you know, and so on and so on. And so like, when you actually love someone, they become kind of an graspable in some way. It's like what happens when you feel something beautiful, right? This is sort of uncrossed ability, but it's real, right? So somehow. Love means the heart, right, love love means that, and so love of wisdom, philosophy means you don't know anything. That's my, you know, boom QED. There you go.

Speaker2: [00:57:08] I think maybe we should talk about film.

Speaker1: [00:57:10] Talk about film. Don't you? So why don't you start off with film?

Speaker2: [00:57:12] So we've been having this idea and chatting about it a little bit in our easy banter that we do at the beginning of the intro to these podcasts. Yeah, no.

Speaker3: [00:57:23] Easy banter.

Speaker2: [00:57:24] Yes, we have. We actually have a copyright on that epistemological

Speaker3: [00:57:29] Scene or ease. You thought about it yourself?

Speaker2: [00:57:32] It's definitely with a z because we prefer those obscure obscure letters. So we've been talking about our favorite sort of proto or actual Anthropocene films or apocalyptic kind of outcomes and the filmic register, and thought it would be interesting to do a kind of film critique, but also film loving as you've brought up the subject of aesthetics and love and the philosophy, philosophy, philosophy, the philosophy lab. And so we wanted to ask you if if you had a favorite kind of Anthropocene esque film.

Speaker3: [00:58:15] Oh gosh, don't get me on my favorite subject. Yeah, this is going to sound very, very strange to most people, but I actually, you know, and so so let's talk corny movies, right? Rather than let's talk incredible movies, art type movies, mysteries, talk total corny movies that you can get on iTunes, right? Interstellar. Oh, nice. Why is interstellar ecological? The interesting thing is that the society that they've created, where they're so incredibly beaten down by whatever it is that's happening, that they have to be so unbelievably efficient and save everything and you know, and constantly be wiping the dust off everything because there are these huge dust storms, because they're living in a dust bowl, trying to survive in the name of survival, you know, to mention another disco song that's gotten a lot of lifeforms killed in the end, this sort of concept of survival, you know, holding onto existing for dear life, right? Survival at any cost, even if I'm totally miserable, you know, and even if I just like, wipe the planet right, that world is, funnily enough, not ecology world that is like neo liberalism on steroids or something. And funnily enough, ecology world, at least in terms of the experiential chemistry of ecology world, is the space part of interstellar, right? Because what's that world that world is? Are we going to be so beating ourselves down with the fact that we're beating ourselves down and beating other lifeforms down? Are we going to be so beaten down by that that we just carry on beating things down as it were or just like collapse in despair? Or as Cooper, the astronaut in the movie, says, Now we just look down and worry about the dirt, right? We used to look up and wonder about the stars, right? And it's also keyed to like re-creating America and recreating agriculture and Riga.

Speaker3: [01:00:05] And you can so do this massive critique of this film. So it's another reason why it's kind of ironic that I actually find it's a profoundly ecological film in a different way, right? Because what it's trying to do, presumably going through the wormhole is equivalent to. But being able to fantasize about anything actually just in any way whatsoever because you're so beaten down the possibility that you could just like imagine that something might be different, just anything different is profoundly utopian, right? And so like how to get wiggle room, how to find some wiggle room in this despair and all the way through the movie that's repeated, right? Cooper gets stuck in this horrifying looking Tesseract thing in the middle of this black hole, and he's trying to talk to his daughter, and we've all had the dream where we're screaming at the person that we love, but they can't hear us. And he's trying to do that because he can see through time, he can see his daughter. And that's basically he's in some kind of Dante esque version of his kind of hell right there, and he's in a sort of Escher painting of despair. Right? And then along comes Tars, who is basically an animated version of the 2001 monolith spliced with a Dunhill cigarette packet. And Tars kind of comes through on the transmitter. Cooper, Cooper, Cooper come in Cooper. And so Tars is kind of like his uncle slash wiser, older brother slash

Speaker1: [01:01:28] Kind

Speaker3: [01:01:28] Of cool wise power animal slash in Buddhist terms. Bodhichitta, actually, he's tars Cooper's bodhichitta, which is like the wiggle room to actually have like like joy and compassion and realization inside to you, right? And you know, he sort of half snaps Cooper out of it. Come in, come in Cooper, you know, and eventually they figure out how to, you know, work with the situation and play with the situation and they get the wiggle room and everything gets figured out. And so like, what's funny is that if you suck all of the content out, which is like, we're trying to find another earth in another galaxy and like repopulate it and probably do the same thing that we did on this one. All that kind of stuff. If you just suck that out and you're just left with the phenomenological chemicals of that aspect of the film, what you're dealing with is trying to restart. The ability to fantasize, right? One of the things that we keep telling ourselves is we couldn't possibly live like First Peoples do. That would be insane. I mean, just that would be ridiculous. We must carry on living like not that, you know, and I've actually been accused of like like if you start using that kind of language or saying that kind of thing, like, how dare you try to put on the clothes of these people? But I do.

Speaker3: [01:02:42] And it's sort of like, Well, you know, the one thing that we don't allow ourselves to do, which is try to live in a less violent co-existence with other life forms is the one thing that would actually be really neat. It was actually feel really good. And imagine that, right? Like, like, imagine that that we've been deleting for the last 12 and a half thousand years, right? It takes a sci fi movie to do that because sci fi movies, as the director, Christopher Nolan pointed out, because he figured this out when he was making it are about extreme emotion, right? Extreme despair, extreme wonder, absolute horror, total amazement, fear, panic. And this is what ecological awareness, which is basically awareness of all kinds of different scales, including this 12000 years scary sounding one that I just mentioned. That's what it brings up, actually extreme emotion, you know, and how to stay kind of limber and like imagining different options in extreme emotion world. The thing about Tarr's the animated downhill cigarette packet is that he has a humor setting. And while Cooper dials it down to 75 percent because he's a little bit distressed with the 100 percent humor setting, it sort of not nice that that Cooper's kind of spirit animal is actually kind of a funny person like sort of a clown person. And he's actually played by Bill Irwin, who is a kind of 80s kind of clown on the TV, right? So somehow there's something essential about that going on where in the end it's one of the most bleak, non funny where's the libido? Can't somebody have sex kind of films that you've ever seen? You know? I mean, it goes to the point where Coop is willing to fall into a black hole to allow his mate brand to go on a blind date with some guy that she doesn't even really know.

Speaker3: [01:04:27] And that might be dead on some other planet. I mean, wow, you know that I'm the first one. I'm watching the movie. I'm thinking, that's the level of sacrifice. You need to be able to understand the world of a polar bear, right? Like, like, like, I don't really get off on your world, you know, but I'm ready to, like, fall into a black hole to allow you to get off on it. Right? But then there's even another stage which is like learning to play right. Learning to be play in that in that space rather than just like, I'm just going to fall into the black hole. I'm going to find some wiggle room in the black hole, right? And so somehow that's functionally equivalent to achieving a rather good non-controlled society sort of optimized for non-violent coexistence, ecological experiential chemistry.

Speaker1: [01:05:12] Let me ask, let me ask a quick follow up, which I think will probably be our last question for today. So movie version of dark ecology, who directs it and why?

Speaker3: [01:05:22] Oh my gosh. Wow, who directs it? When they were doing the audio book of hyper objects, I desperately wanted them to choose James Earl Jones so he could do it in a Darth Vader voice or Lady Mary from Downton Abbey, I couldn't quite decide which would be better. So let's see now. Gosh, which director? Well, it's going to have to be Ridley Scott, isn't it? But it's not the it's not. It's it's not like you. It's not the Martian Ridley Scott. It's a bit too sincere. Oh, do you know? Can I say something about that for a minute when you take the ecstasy tablet? Masters of Anxiety, you will find that you are not a master of anxiety anymore. What you will find is that you're a chameleon. That's that's what's going on. We've been telling ourselves for hundreds of years that we are white, western, mostly men, you know, negation monsters who sort of whose job is to go through the world. Pac-man ing it right in various different ways. And actually, no, that's not correct. What it what's actually the case is that we're chameleons. We are capable of taking on the colors and patterns and vibes and things of all different sorts that are in our environment. And we can know this by going to an art gallery and looking at a painting. It's not difficult or stroking your cat, right? It's incredibly easy to figure this out, right? So Blade Runner Ridley Scott directed why? Because. He's attuned to the kind of. Sort of. Funny melancholia. Slightly Melancholia with a slight, winsome smile. That, to me, is just one level below.

Speaker3: [01:07:01] Horror mode, which is what we're stuck in right now in ecological art mode. We're kind of the deepest down we can go. His horror mode horror mode is when he realized that the abject stuff that stuck on you in disgust mode, which you were in, you know, a while back. Can't be peeled off, you know, at all at that moment, you freak out because you're a white western patriarch. Oh my God, I came out of a vagina. Ah, but like that looks kind of like the home alone face when you turn the camera around onto it. And so actually, it's kind of funny, like, could you not say that more than like once because like it kind of like makes you look a little bit weird. Like, how come every page of a certain kind of prose is basically saying I came out of a vagina in various different coded ways because it's juicing itself on the uncanny. And as we know from Freud, the uncanny is that right? Oh, for a while, it's sort of like, could we like lower the uncanny sort of juicing down just a little bit, please? So you discover this sublevel that's much less like buggy because it's got much less like patriarchy in it and it's got this kind of winsome, melancholic smile to it is beginning to realize that you're in a realm of toys. And so kind of like, it's like going into JF Sebastian's room or actually you realize that you're already in Joe Sebastian's room. Oh my god, I'm a I'm an animated puppet in JF Sebastian's workshop, so I'm a person.

Speaker3: [01:08:31] But maybe I'm just an animated puppet. And since I'm not holding on to a concept of God who's going to save me from this logic, I'm going to allow myself to be something that is paranoid, that it might be just an android, and that's about as good as it gets right. But it's more non-violent and thinking I am a person I know who do it right. And so whoever else comes through, like, maybe it's Roy, you know, like I can wave to him and like, play chess with him and you know, it's all good and like we can play games with like very, very hot boiled eggs and stuff, you know? And so sort of like what's ruling that world is a kind of winsome gothy Cocteau Twins kind of atmosphere. And the guardian of that world is Wally the robot, right? And so somehow, you know, because he's collecting things, he doesn't exactly know why yet, but he's he knows that they contained some kind of joy. He can't quite figure it out. He can't quite enjoy yet, but nevertheless, he's collecting a lot of other people's enjoyment stuff, right? Somehow, this is the functionally equivalent to where we will be next. I feel sort of almost inevitably, once every like mostly boy philosopher has like stopped like doing a home alone on this stuff. And once we've gotten out of like. Let's traumatize ourselves Pete's dream propaganda mode in sort of ecological art mode. Right? So, yeah, Ridley Scott, but like the sort of but like the sort of thoughtful, melancholic Ridley Scott with Vangelis as the perfect.

Speaker1: [01:09:57] Yeah, no. I was going to say this because there's multiple Ridley Scott. So you want to choose your Ridley Scott carefully choose your Ridley Scott, the choose your Ridley Scott and choose him carefully. Tim Morton, thank you for coming in and listening to our weird questions and giving such thoughtful and textured and inspiring responses to them. We hope you're going to come back to this podcast many, many times in the future. And as we keep trying to think our way into and past the Anthropocene.

Speaker3: [01:10:27] Thank you so much.