In my experience, academia is a World War 1 kind of a domain, and I do my best to avoid all that trench warfare.
— Timothy Morton
Reductionism and elimination make one feel clever, but what happens when the meditator drops her fixation on feeling clever?
A weird thing is a strange loop, what some of us call 'an object.' Thus it is looked down on by the constructivist spokespeople of anti-art, which is also an anti-products movement - the dominant mode of high art since the inception of the Anthropocene.
In many cases, contemporary materialisms map uncannily well onto Pre-Socratic ideas such that instead of Anaximander, we have the physicist David Bohm and his idea of an underlying 'implicate order' that transcends time and space.
I find it beyond stunning that there is a school of thought or two out there that swears we are into solids and that solids are bad and liquids are good.
I love David Bohm. I started to get into speculative realism because I started reading his work.
Being seen means that your being is held by the other person without comment, without praise or blame or indifference - just with some kind of open care.
It's easier to be the art school band than to be the Beatles.
I like being irritating.
When I make music, I often sound better singing as a woman, go figure, so I like to tweak the format and pitch and suchlike of my recorded voice. Sounds better.
I so totally refuse to 'make an effort to understand' the people who have become vectors for a fascist spectacular politics.
I used to keep a folder with all my rejection letters in it - a few years into having a job, I burned it.
I try to have little or no alcohol when I go to a big conference. Sorry to be a party pooper, but that stuff can regress you really fast, and this is not a good place to regress.
If you're applying for jobs, get a suit now, whether or not you get an interview. Spend as much as you can on it without breaking the bank. It will do you some good.
The ideal job letter starts with a brilliant light. Then we realize that this brilliant light is actually sunlight, shafts of it, pouring through trees onto a thick bed of pine needles. Soft dusty resin floats in the sun shafts, invitingly. The smell of pine and sap rises from the forest floor. A twig snaps underfoot.
'Free speech' isn't speech at all if it's being used without listening, attention, or care.
After a lifetime of listening to every Floyd album pretty much all the time - they're etched - 'Animals' is the one I can listen to again and again.
In the U.K. - correct me if I'm wrong - there is a legal definition of 'not being in possession of yourself' aka 'not being a person.' That's the fun thing: someone such as a lawyer needs to define, using some empirical signal, something supposedly transcendental like 'person,' something lawyers argue and argue about regarding, say, chimps in zoos.
Fear of nothingness is fear of a certain physicality, a physicality whose phenomena I cannot predictably demarcate from its reality in advance.
Psychologism holds that logical assertions are percolations of brains. Thus logic is a set of rules for how healthy brains operate. Aside from the infinite regress of a brain determining whether a brain is healthy, we have the infinite regress of the idea 'All concepts are brain percolations' being itself a brain percolation, on its own terms.
OOO objects have all the abjection added back in. They don't behave like normalized patriarchal subjects at all.
Before there was Bjork, there was Prince. That's a very simple encapsulation of my personal pop life.
When you look for the environment, you find things that are in it: a hammer, a smartphone, some rusty nails, a shed, a spider, some grass, a tree. So there is a big difference between environmentality and Nature. Nature is definitely something you can point to: it is 'over yonder' in the mountains, in my DNA, under the pavement.
If you have suffered from trauma, one of the most healing things that can happen to you is being seen. Being seen doesn't have to mean that someone actually lays their eyes on you, although that certainly helps.
It's easier to be Eric Idle than to be Paul McCartney.
Does anyone recall hippies designing things for Generation X? Does anyone recall the elegance of that? How design was about making things simpler?
In the end, a lifeform is always a hybrid, a being endowed with some X-power such as being able to breathe for a few seconds out of water. That's how evolution works. Spectrally. We are all mermaids.
'Humankind' is an attempt to think the human species without Nature and without humanity.
Somewhat selfishly, perhaps, I like to think that the best people sometimes take a few goes to get a job.
Spending some money on the you who is going to get a job is essential.
Always say less than you think you need. Inject some space into the conversation.
Job applications are an aesthetic event. They are performance art. They are not about proving you are smart - well, maybe your writing sample does that, but even then, the main point is to get an interview.
I grew up in a haunting postindustrial landscape where prehistoric ferns grew among tens of railway tracks surmounted by brilliant arc lights where birds nested and sang in the dead of night, because for them, it was day.
We're all human beings, in the end, despite our differences.
Nothingness is not nothing at all, so it is physical, but not in the sense of constant presence. Nothingness is disturbing. It is there in a mind-independent sense; it is part of what is given.
I discover in my experiential space evidence for the wrongness of solipsism, and this evidence is called beauty.
There is no essence, but there is a flux that is more real than any instance of the flux, such as a milk bottle or a tiger.
'Do not touch ontologically' doesn't mean 'are separated by empirically measurable hard edges.'
Bohm's 'ontological interpretation' was so called because of the bad rap the word 'ontology' has had in our correlationist age. As a bit of a put-down.
An environment is precisely something one is unable to point to yet is strangely there nonetheless.
If you've read 'Dark Ecology,' you'll know there's a whole thing about cats in it, more than once.
My mates Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe have put together thirty one episodes of a really really nice podcast at Rice as part of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The 'Cultures of Energy Podcast' is so good!
An adjective, such as 'flimsy,' describes someone's access to a thing, such as 'argument.' But that's just that someone's access. It may be accurate. But it's theirs nevertheless.
I always knew Andy Hageman would publish incredible eco stuff.
The Left is correctly wary of talk about nonhumans in the key of Nature and its spiritual partner, humanity.
If you're facing rejection right now, it's very important to realize, especially in a down market, that it's not personal. Really. Truly. The indifference of the system is also crushing. But perhaps it's better than thinking that someone was out to get you.
Applying for a job after finishing a Ph.D is about turning yourself inside out. You've been involved in the most introverted process you've ever done, and now you have to show yourself to the world at large.
A job letter, an interview - even a writing sample - have far less to do with intellect and far more to do with aesthetics than you think.
I'm the absolute worst at getting jobs, ever. I had 100 rejections before I landed one. I kept all the letters in a folder until I realized I could just chuck them away.
Pollution is everywhere, in that ancient Greek sense of miasma: guilt experienced as abject body fluid, moral pollution defining what kinds of beings count in social space.
