coe087_harvey_POLISHED.mp3 NOTES [00:00:37] Overlapping speakers. Timothy says, "Talking about the hyposubject." [00:19:02] Unknown word here, NOT "corona." [00:20:25] Trim perimeter? It is NOT "Trump reporter." TRANSCRIPT Dominic Boyer: [00:00:23] Well, welcome everyone to our sheltering in a safe place edition of the Cultures of Energy podcast we have on the line the man who knows a thing or two about hyperobjects, Timothy Morton. Hey, Ted Timothy Morton: [00:00:37] And and also Dominic, it's the hyposubjects. Yes. ...hyperobject. That's right. Do I ever feel like a hyposubject today? Yes. I mean, waiting around the neighborhood in my swimming trunks because wearing pants means that you get extremely wet. Because as I was just saying, there's there's 40 centimeters of water at the end of my street and there's a there's a current you can feel it, you know? And we've had about four tornadoes in the last hour. You can slightly hear them. They sort of like this big bass frequency underneath the rain. Dominic Boyer: [00:01:11] Oh, is that what that is? Cymene Howe: [00:01:12] So. Yes. So have you seen them at all or are you just hearing them? We've been getting these alerts like every 10 minutes. There's been another tornado alert, but I don't know where they are exactly. Timothy Morton: [00:01:21] Yeah, yeah, my I mean, you know, in an area where there's lots of buildings, it's unlikely that they'll touch down might probably the closest they could touch down to us is Memorial Park, right, which is probably about a mile or two to the northwest of of both of us. Cymene Howe: [00:01:38] Right, right. Timothy Morton: [00:01:40] Yeah. Dominic Boyer: [00:01:40] Well, let's give a quick update to people who care. I mean, first of all, I think we're all safe, right? We're all doing OK, although moist now and increasingly so moist. How are things looking over in your neighborhood, Tim? Timothy Morton: [00:01:54] Well, you know, when I was looking for a house, Dominic, a few years ago, one of the criteria for sure was, is this in a flood plain? And of course, flood plains are hilarious because they're all based on kind of historical, you know, history and history is changing right now. So you never know, right? But you know, I feel rather privileged. I live near the Menil Collection and we've quote unquote only got about 15 centimeters plus on average, which kind of comes and goes. And I feel terrible for the people who live, for example, in in southeast Houston, where they've got something more like 50 centimeters, something like that plus. And you guys are fairly OK. Right? Are you OK? Cymene Howe: [00:02:38] Yeah, I mean, we have rain in the gutters, of course, but it's not, it's not really flooding here at all, except down by the bayou. It's almost up to street level, right? Dominic Boyer: [00:02:47] Yeah. The Buffalo Bayou, which is the big one that runs through the center of town, is right at its cresting point, and I went down to have a look at it earlier and to see I-45 flooded out to. And you know, it was amazing, but there were also some. Have you noticed how people are very interested in animal life in this? Timothy Morton: [00:03:05] Yes. Dominic Boyer: [00:03:06] And there's a lot of photos. You remember the dog clutching the bag of food, walking down the street early on in the hurricane? Timothy Morton: [00:03:12] So I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dominic Boyer: [00:03:13] And then I had the strangest feeling when I when I walked up and saw all the geese and ducks that were standing around right at street level, where normally they would be down very close to the water. And they just they gave me these looks that they seem to be pitying me. I think they were really or or maybe just feeling uncomfortable about our proximity, but everyone was just kind of trying to deal with it. Cymene Howe: [00:03:33] Or maybe they felt victorious that they had finally risen to the level where they belong. Dominic Boyer: [00:03:37] There was a story in the news this morning about a coyote who got into a golf course avoiding water. But the thing that I saw that was the most amazing were these clusters of fire ants. Did you? Did you know about this, Tim, that they they can create kind of life rafts for themselves and they can float for days or weeks or even months, apparently as a little kind of clump like football shaped clump of fire ants, yeah. Timothy Morton: [00:04:01] That's all, all, all we can do is throw and sweat as human beings. That's, like, we're we're the top at sweating. Dominic Boyer: [00:04:07] Yeah. Dominic Boyer: [00:04:08] And especially in Houston. Timothy Morton: [00:04:09] There's a lot of boredom and anxiety right now, punctuated by fear and logistical hassles. Sweating is something I'm doing quite a lot. So, yay. Cymene Howe: [00:04:18] Well... Timothy Morton: [00:04:19] I guess the other thing is that the toads, you know, all around there are toads, you know, who are sort of off their faces with with, with enjoyment. Dominic Boyer: [00:04:26] Yeah, that's what people. That's the main thing I've seen on my Facebook feed have been people saying the frogs are singing in my garden. You know, everything is turned into a frog paradise. And I think that's kind of beautiful in a way. Despite the, you know, all the devastation that's happening around us. Timothy Morton: [00:04:40] It is. And as you know, as my security blanket, when I was somewhere between about one and four years old was Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Jeremy Fisher. Other people took teddy bears around with them, and I took the Tale of Jeremy Fisher, which is about a frog who lives in a flooded house. And I've always been interested in kind of interstitial spaces like that, right? And it's sort of how fantastic that I now get to be (fantastic, unquote) that I get to be Jeremy Fisher for a minute. Cymene Howe: [00:05:08] You have to get out your fishing pole then because he went fishing, didn't he? Timothy Morton: [00:05:12] Yeah, he goes fishing and he gets caught by a pike and he gets dragged underwater. And then he gets and then he gets to have tea with Ptolemy Tortoise and Sir Isaac Newton, Newt apostrophe O-N and I just got this bearded dragon, you know. My best friend's son, yeah, exactly, gave me a lovely, bearded dragon and kind of he's he's Sir Isaac Newton at this point. And you know, we've we've we've definitely given each other the eye about this storm recently. Cymene Howe: [00:05:42] So has your has your bearded dragon been tuned in to the disaster and the storminess because animals and even lizards, no offense to the lizards, but even they are tuned in to disruptions in the natural system. I remember in the the big earthquake in 1989 in the San Francisco Bay Area. A lot of animals like, well, there was an iguana that jumped out of a window and dogs were going crazy before the earthquake hit. Hmm. Yeah, they could. I guess they perceive the slight, I don't know, vibrations or something. Yeah, something wrong with the force. Timothy Morton: [00:06:18] Yeah, cats. Cats were going a bit mental just before the hurricane came in, actually. Kind of jumping around nervously. Interesting behavior, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and you've you've got to wonder how much of whatever it is about human evolution or human, whatever kind of overwrites some of that stuff. You know, I experienced my lizard as a very contemplative sort of a chap, you know, because he's completely locked into the Solar System. You know, this whole thing about reptiles needing to be the dominant ones and the whole thing about the reptile brain. I can't help thinking that's a bit mammal centric at this point. And these guys are really like infants. They're so helpless. They're like sort of cold baggies full of smaller baggies when you feel them. So they're just like baggies full of internal organs, you know, and they they rely on the surface that they happen to be on, you know? And I just sort of wonder whether there's something in the sort of mammal behavior or sort of code or whatever that that kind of overwrites something rather rather important or interesting there. Dominic Boyer: [00:07:26] Yeah, because we we also only have our surface to live on, right? Although, yeah, we do maybe pretend we don't, Cymene Howe: [00:07:31] But maybe mammals do feel more autonomous because we're able to heat ourselves. Timothy Morton: [00:07:37] Yeah, exactly. And like the search for prey, like the proactive search for it as opposed to waiting for it to come to you. Maybe that kind of maybe I'm sort of wondering in a completely hypothetical way whether the most spiritual traditions that talk about meditation are in fact about getting back in touch with your inner lizard rather than transcending yourself and to sort of like transcendental kind of Ray Kurzweil-space. Perhaps the whole idea is literally hyposubjective guys, and we are supposed to be kind of sinking down into a quote unquote more primitive DNA state. Cymene Howe: [00:08:15] Right? So it's like the hypo-cerebral getting down to the deep core of your cerebrum Timothy Morton: [00:08:21] Where there's just awareness, right? There's just sort of some kind of awareness happening. Mm hmm. Dominic Boyer: [00:08:25] Yeah. So have you. I mean, as you, I want to give you credit because I've been watching your Facebook feed as I've been watching many people's Facebook feeds rather obsessively the past 48 hours or so. And I feel as though you had a correct level of foreboding about this event, whereas other people, including myself, you know, we're kind of walking around yesterday going, Yeah, it's not that bad. I mean, what is this? It's not even a proper hurricane, right? We got some wind, a little bit of rain. And then last night, that was quite spectacular and probably the most powerful set of lightning storms I've ever seen in my life, followed by just torrential flooding. But I feel like you had a you had a sense your radar was was picking this up correctly. Timothy Morton: [00:09:06] Well, I told you I was talking to my lizard, but no, I feel a little bit like I, I feel like I'm nothing special, really. It's like this sort of possibly it's my sort of habitual paranoia. Or possibly it's just because I don't know, I, I sort of assume that these things are, you know, long term sort of events. Not not not not really long term in terms of months, right, but potentially in terms of cleanup months, actually. And you know, where there's going to be kind of moments when you're wondering what on earth is going on, right? Is that kind of hyperobjects feeling of thinking, maybe it's happening, maybe it isn't, you know, precisely because you're inside it. And I think, you know, like as it approaches, any chaotic system gets harder and harder to predict, right? And you sort of think, gosh, it's now it's coming now it's not. And there's the whole kind of weird way in which you're being kind of pulled to and fro by your expectations all the time in this kind of situation. Dominic Boyer: [00:10:09] Yeah, absolutely. Cymene Howe: [00:10:10] So can we, Tim, should we call it? Can we call Harvey a hyperobject or not? What do you think? Dominic Boyer: [00:10:15] Are we authorized to do this? Timothy Morton: [00:10:18] Yes, the I'm the, I'm the Archbishop of this, and only I get to decide what counts as a hyperobject. So I can't tell you how many people write me emails. Is this a hyperobject? And now, of course, people are sending me things. Is this solidarity with non-human beings? And there was somebody, some photo of somebody taking, you know, protecting an American flag as a provocatively tweeting at me. Is this solidarity with non human being? Oh my goodness. You know, luckily, my get out clause is I don't get to be the object police. I get to talk about how these things exist rather than whether they exist. But come on now, let's call it, we're inside a hyperobject guys, Cymene Howe: [00:10:56] Yeah, it feels like it Timothy Morton: [00:10:58] Does, doesn't it? It makes you feel pretty small and pathetic and sort of like Dominic Boyer: [00:11:03] And and you know, I was going to say it and it carries with it the scent and and sort of ephemeral tales of other hyperobjects, too, because in addition to, you know, the Anthropocene climate change, global warming one that I'd like to talk a bit about today. I also I just walked out on the back porch and smelled this really strong petro smell, which other people have been reporting periodically around the area, so it's as though somehow the oil has got into the air. Who knows what the hell is happening southeast of here? Something bad, probably, but but anyway, Timothy Morton: [00:11:38] I got that too. Dominic Boyer: [00:11:39] You got it? Just so there's there's other bad stuff in the air, but it all is kind of this sensory scape. Yeah, of hyperobjectivity. Cymene Howe: [00:11:49] See now that's, that's something they don't tell you about in your hurricane preparedness kit is to have a gas mask. Dominic Boyer: [00:11:54] Have a gas mask. Timothy Morton: [00:11:55] Oh, quite. Exactly. Yeah. Dominic Boyer: [00:11:56] But anyhow, no, that didn't resolve to a question, Tim. I was just curious about your thinking about this as a matrix of hyperobjects. Timothy Morton: [00:12:03] Oh, I would love to speak to that, actually, because, you know, in the negative, we're being shown something quite profound and and true, I feel, which is that we can share worlds right? Like hyper objects can enter penetrate, right? You can be inside lots of different ones, but it's not like being inside a Russian doll where there's lots and lots of very tightly sealed containers on your inside all of them. It's more like being sort of inside a collection of lots of different sort of piles of sand, and some of the piles slightly overlap, right? Like my microbiome and the bacteria outside kind of overlap a little bit, right? And I'm trying to make this argument that there is such a thing as world. We do have worlds, but these worlds are not vacuum sealed, right? Which is why certain extreme forms of identity politics need to be tweaked a little bit. But we do have them and we can share them, but we don't necessarily have to share them 100 percent, right? So you can share the world of Cecil the Lion who got shot by the dentist, and you can share that world 30 percent, which is great because it's not zero. It doesn't have to be 100. Maybe it can't ever be 100. Do I even share my world 100 percent with myself? Do I share the world of the people down the street? Do I share Dominic and Cymene's world? Well kind of, yes, I do, because we're in Houston, and kind of, no, I don't, because I'm in Montrose, which has a different kind of hurricane water profile right now. Dominic Boyer: [00:13:28] Right? Timothy Morton: [00:13:28] Yeah. And so the whole so the beauty of it in a way is kind of revealed to us in this kind of catastrophe moment where basically it's like we actually do have things in common, guys, and we have things in common with frogs and we have things in common with dogs who carry bags full of shopping. And, you know, we have some solidarity there, actually. Dominic Boyer: [00:13:50] Yeah, no. I feel the same way I felt actually when I saw both the coyote and the golf course image. But then when I walked up on those ducks today, I really did feel there was a sense of solidarity. They were to the extent that they could sort of communicating, "Yeah, we're all in the shit together," and we're going to just try to make our best of it. Cymene Howe: [00:14:04] And they were feeling a little sad for you that you didn't have duck feathers or goose feathers, as it were. Dominic Boyer: [00:14:09] They're like, dude, you can't even float. You're really in the shit now. Timothy Morton: [00:14:12] I really would like to do a shout out to my old anthropomorphism right now, because first of all, we can't help it. You know, second of all, is it really anthropomorphic to say the things that you're saying? Or is it in fact more anthropomorphic to say what they were saying on the BBC the other day, which is, you know, you could never really tell if these if these non-human beings are smiling at you? I mean, maybe it's just like a kind of robot smile, you know? Well, maybe I'm just robots smiling when I smile, guys, come on now. Cymene Howe: [00:14:39] Yeah, we've seen plenty of politicians on TV with that robot smile and lots of university administrators too. So we know it's possible. Timothy Morton: [00:14:48] Although I'd like to make a little shout out to the President of Rice. He actually did step up to the plate at the beginning of term, and he issued a preemptive proclamation about the kind of racism that's been coming out of the closet in this country because the President brought the dog whistle within the range of human hearing. Yeah, and I was quite proud of him, actually, that he made a very strong, very deliberate statement that we're not going to tolerate any of this stuff on campus. And I was pretty glad that he did that. Cymene Howe: [00:15:17] Yeah, I agree. It was a very strong statement. It went into detail. It was long and he he got out in front of it before there was any crisis happening. Timothy Morton: [00:15:24] Yeah, yeah, totally. Three cheers for that really, it's great. You know, sort of shows you how people can step up when stuff happens. You know, we're not completely locked into our habitual patterns, just like we're not locked into our, into our world, you know? It would be very sad if there wasn't such a thing as world because it would mean that we're just, like, little tiny, you know, mechanized atomic particles, you know? But fortunately, that can't be true. He said wittily, Dominic Boyer: [00:15:54] You know, it's we've had quite a week. If you look at back...I follow the news cycles and actually the Charlottesville news cycle is still kind of out there. And it's it's what you would call in hurricane terms, a little remnant floating around somewhere, a little tropical depression of, of Charlottesville, you know, racism, the Joe Arpaio thing and all of that still out there. The eclipse, of course, came and gone. You know, the the magic of Geos. And then, and then here we have this. So that juxtaposition is, it's quite a lot of terror in different kinds, one after another. Timothy Morton: [00:16:29] Yeah, totally. And it's, it's definitely time to reflect about all this stuff, you know, because Houston is probably the most de-segregated big city in the USA, and it's the third largest city in the USA at this point. I think it goes Los Angeles, New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago. And, you know, let's show the presidential administration what we're made of down here, really. There's a whole other way of being. Cymene Howe: [00:17:02] Right. Well, apparently he's threatened to come here right? Is that still happening? Dominic Boyer: [00:17:05] Oh, that'll help. Yes. Cymene Howe: [00:17:06] And we'll get embraced by his little hands. Timothy Morton: [00:17:09] Well, talking of Toad like Jabba the Hutt-type. Cymene Howe: [00:17:16] Exactly. Yeah. Well, we had Dominic and I were talking yesterday too, because yesterday was a very tame day, at least in the part of Houston where where we were and we actually went out and drove around and it was hardly even raining. And we were, I won't say, disappointed, but there was so much hype around the hurricane and we had stocked up and stockpiled everything. And then there didn't seem to be much. And so I decided to deejay the storm and I got out. I went on YouTube and and got Peggy Lee on the line singing, "Is That All There Is?" Dominic shut that down very quickly because he said it sounded old and country, which it's not exactly. Today I think I would dj the storm with the Eurythmics song, "Here Comes the Rain Again." Timothy Morton: [00:17:58] Oh, very nice, right? That's great. That's that's perfect. Cymene Howe: [00:18:02] I think that's a good one to put on. Dominic Boyer: [00:18:04] Talk to us about what your listening to. Timothy Morton: [00:18:05] We need some kind of, we need something like that sort of cold futurist early 80s British song for don't be like like, like, let's you know, the aristocrats don't have a, don't have a lock on that mode and the, the, the refusal to cave into just collapsing into the fetal position I find extremely bracing. So yeah, I think that sounds ideal. Actually, let's try to find some nice Human League. And you know, I'll I'll think on that a while and get back to you about. Cymene Howe: [00:18:46] Yeah. Think about what your mixtape would be. But do you think about that Eurythmics song? It begins with the little raindrops it goes. Dee Dee Dee Dee Dee, right? Yeah, it's got that little, that, that sort of the dimples of rain on a roof. Like little, like little footprints, Tim, like little footprints. Timothy Morton: [00:19:02] Like little footprints. And the thing about Annie Lennox, of course, is that she's a meditator, you know, and the the Tibetan for some Saraha, you know, which is, you know, whatever that is, the kind of confusion space that we seem to be in is corona, which means the vortex, actually. And a hurricane is an amazing image for it. And I think it precisely brings up what you were talking about, Cymene, which is this kind of weird boredom, like, is this really happening? And Oh, let's go out, you know, in the feeling of being stuck inside and maybe there's nothing happening outside, and maybe I could go to Goode company seafood, but it's about half a mile away. But I don't think I'll go two miles away, but maybe I could go five blocks down the street. All those, sort of, calculations that one makes every day anyway become really heightened. And you know, the, the opportunity for getting kind of lost in the, in the confusion space is pretty intense. Like, I can't help thinking of the of the good old Matrix, you know, and how in that kind of film noir tradition, it's raining, like in Blade Runner, and then in the second one, it's raining even more. And then in the third one, when Agent Smith is about to become everybody, it's really, really raining. If you see what I mean. And I can't help thinking, that's a great, that's a great image for something more, more, more general, perhaps. Dominic Boyer: [00:20:24] Yeah, I like that. Timothy Morton: [00:20:25] There's a very moving translation of one of the four reminders you have to, sort of, do if you're a Tibetan Buddhist. You have to remind yourself every day this sort of grim sense of humour that you're born into a precious human body, but death could come at any moment. The laws of karma are inevitable, and some saraha is all pervasive, so you better get down and do stuff, which is sort of what I never do because I make the worst meditator ever. But the Trump reporter came up with a spontaneous translation of it because he'd left all these texts in Tibet. And the fourth one is something like some sorrow is a giant ocean of suffering. Unendurable, unbearably intense. Which is very good description of some of the stuff that's happening in our world, but in particular right here now at this moment. Cymene Howe: [00:21:15] Mm hmm. Dominic Boyer: [00:21:16] Yeah. You know, I have. That's beautiful. Cymene Howe: [00:21:19] Drowning in samsara, right? Dominic Boyer: [00:21:21] Yeah. And maybe, maybe that's, that inflicts what I was going to ask about, actually. I'm interested in both of your opinions about this because as I was walking around the neighborhood today, and you're right, I think that the only thing I can liken this to is that feeling of a blizzard, you know? But the difference with the blizzard is that it's almost so frightening to be outside because of the cold. You really don't want to go out. You really it's you. You want to get in the cave. Whereas a hurricane somehow because it's warm out and it's not so windy out, it actually kind of entices you out. There's a lure to it to get outside that that I find interesting. Timothy Morton: [00:21:57] May I just interject here one small thing? The uncanny thing is that, you know, for people who don't live in Houston, violent storms here are far more violent on a, on a, in a, in an acute way than this hurricane. Actually, what's going on right now is chronic, right? There's sort of like medium level Houston rain, but it keeps on and on and on and on. And so yes, you could be enticed outside. And I'm sorry, I interrupted. Dominic Boyer: [00:22:23] No, I was going to say but, but the thought I had, which is never really, you know, we've been all thinking about climate change, Anthropocene issues for some time. And so we know rationally this city in a sense doesn't have a future. This was the first day that I felt that emotionally as I was walking around going, This may not be a habitable city anymore. I mean, given that this type of event actually could have been a lot worse, I mean, we could have, we could have had the high winds knocked out our power then plus had all this rain dumped on us in the flooding, and we don't know how it's going to end. But for many people right now, the city is not habitable, right? And I don't know. It was a moment of reckoning of a certain kind, and I'm not sure how I felt about it, so I wanted to just share it and hear your thoughts. Mm hmm. Cymene Howe: [00:23:06] Mm hmm. Timothy Morton: [00:23:07] Well, Cymene, do you want to go? Cymene Howe: [00:23:09] Well, I don't know. I was just thinking we got I texted my dad, who also lives here in town and he his apartment has three inches of water in it. Right. So, you know, he's just sort of hunkered down and waiting for that to subside, I guess, or to get higher. But it's not a good time to be at ground level or below ground level anywhere. And then there's this kind of contradiction between the warnings, too, because with the tornado warnings, you're supposed to go into a basement or a lower room away from windows and an inside wall to stay away from the the wind cone, right? Right. And yet if there's flooding happening, you should go up to your roof. Dominic Boyer: [00:23:50] It's like there's the psychosis of our situation mapped out right there, like go down, go up, go down and go up. Cymene Howe: [00:23:55] Yeah. So it's a little schizophrenic. Timothy Morton: [00:23:58] So yeah, and the fact that you're never going to get it absolutely right because you're going to make very contingent decisions and there's always going to be at least one flaw in every plan. Mm hmm. Yeah, right. Yeah, I'm a I'm, you know, I talk a good game because I, you know, in my public sort of lectures and stuff, I try to get people over at least the denial speed bump of the grief process. I mean, that kind of comes up for me when you say, you know, this city might not have a future, but you know, in my, in my daily life, I'm a great denial expert. Actually, I'm a fantastic at it. I've A-plus denial person. Not not global warming denial, but grief denial. Sure, this isn't happening. The city will be fine. We can muddle through, you know, a determined, you know, inability to look fact squarely in the face will see us through kind of thing. So yeah, that's haunting. Actually, Dominic and I, my immediate impulse is to kind of shut down and not accept that. Cymene Howe: [00:25:01] I mean, I don't know if this sounds callous, but in some ways I don't have a lot of nostalgia for Houston as a city, though. Like if the downtown were to flood and all of the oil industry buildings were to erupt in foliage and waterfowl and other, I don't know other flooded imaginaries. Would that be such a bad thing? I don't know. I mean, I don't. I think there are certain places where I would have nostalgia for pieces of land that I know as land becoming water, becoming ocean, becoming lake, becoming bayou. And maybe there's some of that here in Houston, but not a lot. So it's just that cities, coastal cities are returning to the sea is what's happening, and it'll happen slowly, quicker than we imagined, but incrementally. It's already happening in Miami. And so I think we'll see pieces of it here in Houston. But it's just, it's a transformation of land into water. I think places that were dry will become more muddy and, and land will disappear and property will disappear and there will be a lot of wealth lost. Timothy Morton: [00:26:06] But yeah, there's a snag, there's a snag, which is that in the much more in the much larger hyperobject in which we find ourselves, a.k.a. the climate, pretty much nowhere is going to be optimal. You know, you, one, one could sort of run away to the to the arid place where everyone dies of drought, you know? And you know, I actually have a tremendous fondness for any kind of interstitial seaside type of anything. Hmm. And I actually do have, and I may, and maybe it's my, my cancer rising so many, but I actually really like kind of putting down roots quickly, where I, where I live and learning to love a place and it's kind of weird uniqueness, you know? So yeah, I would be pretty bummed if Houston started disappearing. And I, you know, maybe that's, you know, not cool, but actually, I think I really would be. Dominic Boyer: [00:27:05] Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, I guess my feeling was it's very conflicted because on the one hand, you know what you were saying, Cymene is, is, is how I feel also. But maybe what I really encountered for the first time is this thing I've been talking about but haven't really felt myself, which is that now I'm beginning to understand the friction that holds people to the place emotionally, affectively in the broadest sense of the term, such that it's really difficult for them, as you said, to get over that denial speed bump. It's more like a denial border wall. They, they don't want to climb it up because at some level, I think the sense of, and this is not just, I mean, actually for the most part, western or northern civilization tells itself it is rootless. It doesn't really have any especially neoliberal, right. We should move anywhere there's jobs. We shouldn't have these connections to place. And yet I think most human cultures through most of time have been deeply connected to place, and Houston is a weird place to be connected to. And I guess I realized suddenly I am connected to Houston and I do care despite myself Timothy Morton: [00:28:06] Talking of neoliberalism. There is a difference, isn't there between sort of the kind of social mobility that gets advertised about, you know, the ad. Where do you want to go today? Kind of thing, Microsoft, right? That that nineties ad, you know, and being a refugee, which is roughly what it's what, what, you know, the category into which people seem to be falling more and more and more, you know. I struggle to get my daughter a British passport because she has dual citizenship. And the reason why is that Theresa may change the rules so that, you know, because heaven forbid that Syrian refugees have an easy time getting into Britain. And you know, the take away from this is that even quite, quite privileged white guys can be treated a little bit like that at this point because, you know, in the, as, as I didn't have a birth certificate that was issued on the date of the birth because most Americans don't. And as the consular certificate signed by the British ambassador in Washington, DC that said that Claire was British didn't count either, because that was also now out of not, not, not legal. I had to call the pediatrician and get all the original, they didn't want photocopies, hospital records, every single document, and I had to prepare a little portfolio of photographs from every single year of her life, featuring at least one of her parents with a date and, you know, a list on the back of who was in the photo. Wow. You know me, quite a conscientious kind of sort of archival research trained type of a guy took weeks and weeks and weeks getting all this information together. And just imagine if the hospital that you happen to have been in was in Aleppo and it got blown up. Then there's no way you can produce those documents anymore, right? Cymene Howe: [00:30:01] Right, right. Yeah, absolutely no way. Or if you had crossed the Mediterranean and had had your boat sink or tip over and you lost all those documents that you've been keeping on your person even, yeah, right? Timothy Morton: [00:30:14] You know, and so, yeah, the being being forced to, being forced to evacuate, as it were, as opposed to thinking that you chose to, to move around, you know, is quite quite a strong, quite a strong contrast. So it's such an extreme contrast. It's a little bit like the what you guys were saying very rightly about the difference between tornado instructions and hurricane instructions. You know, sort of the ideology is telling you that you need to be mobile and the physical situation is forcing you to be mobile. And the two things don't don't add up at all. Cymene Howe: [00:30:50] Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. Like our daughter has shared bedrooms on the first floor. She doesn't want to sleep in her bedroom tonight because she's afraid of flooding. And yet and yet if a tornado comes, that's where we should all be. Timothy Morton: [00:31:01] I know, right? Yeah. Cymene Howe: [00:31:03] But you know, something else we were talking about yesterday was the kind of pull and drag of the media sphere and the directions that it's been taking this, this storm of Harvey. So there was a lot of dramatic coverage yesterday, and it continues today. And again, maybe yesterday it felt, at least in Houston, less warranted, but of course, down on the coast and in places near Corpus Christi that we're getting, Rockport is the name of that one town that just got, you know, literally blown away and flooded out in so many ways. So there's this really dramatic sort of, I don't know, storm porn or, you know, weather fetish fetishism about the drama of the storm, how much rain. And it's, you know, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of drama around it. Timothy Morton: [00:31:50] Yes, there is. And there's a lot of focus on one particular type of event. And, you know, I mean, people who, this is me being a Texan cite-ist right? But B, but the BBC reporting doesn't include the fact that Rockport is probably, you know, as far away as Scotland is from London, right? Yeah, right for as far away from Houston as that, this is a massive system we're talking about here. And my English friends are messaging me going. you know, What was it like in the hurricane? Well, I'm still in it, and it's not going to go until probably Thursday. Right, right. Like, there's no understanding. I remember when some friends of mine came to visit me in Boulder and they said, We're just going to nip over to the Grand Canyon this afternoon, you know, and I'm like, Yeah, see you in a week then. Cymene Howe: [00:32:36] Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's spaciality is totally different. Yeah. So, you know, there's been a lot of emphasis on the kind of quote unquote natural occurrence of, of the storm and this gigantic system, as you said. And then but I wondered, I mean, Dominic was getting frustrated with the coverage because it was so melodramatic, but I was also thinking in some ways hearing about weather, even though the scale, size and duration of this storm might and I'm sure is connected to human generated climate change and those, those kinds of impacts, but it's not a direct human act that people can see. So unlike Charlottesville or unlike, you know, people being mowed over in Barcelona by other human beings directly like these really clear acts of human aggression against each other is, has become, I mean, obviously, it's something we hear about every other day now, and it's truly horrifying. And I just wonder if there wasn't some affective feeling that, oh my god, like a storm, it's dramatic, it's life threatening, but somehow it, it gives people a reprieve from having to hear about so much human horror and terror against other. Timothy Morton: [00:33:53] It's, it's not a racist shitstorm, so let's divert to that. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, but also I think it brings up, interestingly, so many that you've hit this all kinds of nails on the head there, I thought, because this, this binary, you know, which is a human non-human binary regarding what acting could be, right? So humans act, right, and then everything else quote unquote behaves. Right. And what's interesting about hurricanes from the outside is that you get to watch humans behaving rather than acting right. They're floating in a tub, they're drowning. They're being blown over by the wind. They're being reduced to refugee status and, right. And this is kind of amusing and that sort of porn way, if it's still thinkable that act is very different from behave and, you know, to go back to the, to the racist shitstorm, isn't that also part of it? You know that the people who want to exculpate behavior might want to say, well, it was an act, it was an individual person. It was a lone wolf doing something with full respect to that fascist fool Gorka, you know, who thought that the lone wolf concept was generated by Obama. It's a way of exculpating a massively distributed-over-time group of wolves who always come in packs, right, of white people trying to kill non-white people. And you, sort of, when you look at it as pack behavior distributed over time, you are looking at something more like behavior than, than acting, if you see what I mean. And then perhaps also there's a way in which this kind of news is, is, you know, maybe this is Tim being Pollyanna-ish, you know, but sort of underneath all of it, there's a kind of self-correction so that there's a way in which humans in general know very well that acting as opposed to mechanistic behaving is a fiction. Right? And it's a fiction based on some near platonic Christian concept of act, right, versus passive, you know, which is getting us into a lot of trouble. And I think, you know, one of the things about hurricanes is that they force you into a very radical form of aesthetic appreciation, right? Which I think, you know, you know, when you when you quantized an act, when you break it down unquote into its subatomic particles, those little particles or little dots of appreciating just, just play music with somebody, right. Like, you're trying to integrate with the other person, you're trying to integrate with the musical tradition that you find yourself in, you're attending to your instrument, you're attending to the team that's going on and you know, so, so acting in that sense is made out of little bits of of attunement, you know. And if anything is going to get us to a less fascist place, it's obviously to do with the kind of nonviolent appreciating out of which, you know, actions can truly be made. Despite my fantasy that the correct intellectual position at this point is simply to try to assassinate fascists, you know, from don't try to club them, get into the right position with the right kind of weaponry before it's been banned, you know, before no liberals are allowed to buy guns, you know? This is Tim being a little bit provocative here, and I'm not really going to do this, guys. And, you know, don't try this at home and I'm not really suggesting it, but the fantasy did occur to me, you know, that's just sort of take them out. Cymene Howe: [00:37:25] Mm hmm. Yeah, I think that's a shared fantasy. Dominic Boyer: [00:37:27] That's a gut feeling. I think a lot of people have they don't like to talk about. You know, I, this is a bit of a non sequitur, but also circle back to closer to where the storm started, so to speak. Mm hmm. I yeah, a little frustrated with the media coverage because I think often there really is too much of the focus on the, the spectacle of disaster, the twisted buildings, the. And in that way, I love the dog with a bag of food because it's a beautiful meme that riffs off that and takes it to much more, to my mind, playful way that I, that I like more. But yeah, yeah. But there's a moment in that media coverage that I took quite seriously, which was somewhere around two a.m. last night where people were saying, This is unprecedented. We don't, we don't. We have to create entirely new types of warnings for this storm. Right? The National Weather Service issued a catastrophic flood warning of a type I guess it had never done before. The meteorologists were all over that. And so I thought about this, you know, here we are, and I love that we're doing this because I think it's rare that one gets the opportunity to philosophize a little bit in the middle of a hyperobject. Although, of course, we are doing it all the time. It's spectacularly so. It's unprecedented. I want to know what you, Tim Morton, want to do with the unprecedented-ness of the event. In other words, what can we make out of this? How can we make this an opportunity to, to move things in the way we'd like to see them? Timothy Morton: [00:38:51] Yeah, perhaps, perhaps I could, you know, put a, perhaps rather than no porn, perhaps it's a different type of porn that we want. What strikes me is that what, what's been looked at there in that, in that picture of the media is a kind of disaster porn and as an official UN definition of a disaster, which is that something where no help can come from the inside, right? So help has to come from the outside. And so, you know, immediately, like like the greatest disaster porn would be, you know, the Death Star blowing up Alderaan and you get to see this entire planet being blown up right? Or to take a more amusing example, the Vogons in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy blowing up planet Earth, right? And that kind of disaster porn, which is where a lot of ecological speeches actually, let's rubberneck ourselves from the point of view of extinction in the, in the far future, you know, whereas there's perhaps a different kind of porn to do with catastrophe, you know, where basically catastrophe is an aesthetic, where you're inside it, you know, and the, and the realisation, the gradual realization that everyone et al., you know, the frogs and the humans and everyone, are inside, probably like several nested interlocking interlacing kinds of catastrophe is, is might be a place to to start to find a different kind of way of, appreciate is the wrong word maybe for, for, for people, but a different kind of attunement. If it's the case that, that acting is made out of little bits of of attunement, let's get the porn right rather than trying to have none of, none of it at all, if you see what I mean. Is that even possible? So, so maybe that's my first thought. Let's have nicer, nicer catastrophe pornography, please. Cymene Howe: [00:40:42] Yeah. Well, it would be nice if it was more informed pornography if as if there's such a thing with a better narrative line that actually would tell us how, how this storm is different because of anthropogenic climate change. You know what, what are the factors, in layman's terms, that have made this an unprecedented storm? Because it seems to me that this hurricane and its tropical storm remnants that we're now living through, the waves, the rings of storm is very much like the Anthropocene, and the sense that it's, it goes achingly on, right. This, this storm is going to last for days. So it's got a sort of tedium to it that, it's, it's agonizing. Timothy Morton: [00:41:24] It's agonizing, and you know, the other thing that to say here is about how to act in, in this kind of situation, which is, you know, I do hope that the BBC, like, broadcast this bit that I said because, I did a BBC interview last week in London. And basically, I wanted to tell people, first of all, you're not guilty as an individual human being. Please don't turn this into a religion thing anymore. Don't feel one more second of guilt for any action you do. It's collective action that's started this. It's collective action that's going to change it or stop it, right. And that's not to do with guilt, that's to do with responsibility. And let's draw a line between guilt and responsibility. And let's go as far as to say, when you're in the street, you know, for example, I'm walking in the street about an hour or two ago and there's an old chap on a bicycle and he's making it through the deep water there and his bicycle falls over and he slips, and the impulse is to go over and help, right? And the point is, you know, I didn't cause him to slip, but because I can see him slipping and I can understand what's going on, therefore, I'm responsible and inside this, inside this tropical storm, it becomes very obvious that if you can understand something, you're responsible for it now. This is something that needs to be said now. We don't need to persuade people about the anthropogenic side of it, in a way, for one more second. What we need to be doing is saying, Can you understand the stuff that's going on? Cool, you're responsible for it. You understand Earth is warming? You're responsible for it. Cymene Howe: [00:42:55] Hmm. Mm hmm. That's right. That's right. I think that's Dominic Boyer: [00:42:58] Really well put. That's that might be might be a good note on which to end. Timothy Morton: [00:43:01] What do you think? I think so. Like, let's just let's short circuit the who did what to who and let's just go straight towards, you know, can you, can you, can you understand the key signature of the jazz that you're playing right now, which is this fucked up nasty hyperobject jazz? Great, you're responsible for making it a slightly nicer tune. Cymene Howe: [00:43:21] I love it. Dominic Boyer: [00:43:22] If can hear it, you can have it, is, was it Dizzy Gillespie said. Cymene Howe: [00:43:25] Or now I really want to hear the Eurythmics. Dominic Boyer: [00:43:28] All right, Tim, you take care of yourself. Yeah, we wish you, your children, your family, a safe, a safe harbor. We will stay in touch. Timothy Morton: [00:43:38] I wonder, I wonder whether we can do something like this again, maybe with a couple of other people, too? Because this might be helpful in the long run. Yeah, it was so nice of you to think about it. What a great idea. Thanks for having me, guys. Dominic Boyer: [00:43:51] Oh, thank you, Tim, as always. Cymene Howe: [00:43:53] Yeah, thank you. Stay dry. Timothy Morton: [00:43:55] You too.