#timothymorton

[conatusprinciple]

Agrilogistics, notes

Agrilogistics

Interesting concept from the book Dark Ecology by Timothy Morton.

Morton argues that agrilogistics fundamentally underlies agricultural society, thereby shaping or function as a basic premise for the very foundations of civilization itself(?)

The concept has three parts according to Morton:

Metaphysics of Presence - The concept from Derrida: something exists in so far as it is present. But it also has implications for how we view our surroundings and for ecology: metaphysics of presence is the view that sees nature as a field to be plowed, changed up, added to and mined according to human fancy, completely malleable. Space as an empty container or geometrical Cartesian space. One year we can do this to it, the next year that. Antithetical to a sense of local place with a history, everything is just reduced to abstract, empty space.

I can dig this, but there seems to be somewhat of a conflict in the type of image being used to describe the metaphysics of presence here:

one is more like “nature as amorphous plasticine”

the other is “nature as abstract mathematical space”.

Are these two actually intertwined, two sides of the same way of looking at nature?

A strong demarcation and keeping separate of the realm of the human and the non-human - keeping both the non-human out of the way and keeping the human under strict control and definition, we must never slide into the non-human.

“More existence” is always good, no matter the quality of existence. So more life/more humans equals “better” even if people live completely miserable lives. Morton draws on an argument from Derek Parfit here.

Could we connect ideals like the Hippocratic Oath to this part of agrilogistics?

Life solely viewed as quantity.

Thus easily administrated, quantified, counted.

[williamthirteen]

reading two texts for my fever dreams which quite complement each other… #bookstagram #anthropocene #animism #timothymorton #pelicanbooks #gordonwhite #scarletimprint #endtimes #massextinction https://www.instagram.com/p/CpurNu5NifD/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[insurrectionaryam]

https://artreview.com/november-2015-feature-timothy-morton-charisma-causality/?fbclid=IwAR2-mgz-EGcp5oTlpY9HQPntL1om1HSnxe63uIvLXKnlDmWUJWkFsIyqXHs

Timothy Morton: What If Art Were a Kind of Magic?

From the ArtReview archives: one of the thinkers associated with ‘object-oriented ontology’ argues that we’ve been thinking wrongly about ar

'Whatever human art is, it is telling us something very deep about the structure of how things are: ‘the structure of how things are’ being a pretty good paraphrase of the word ‘ontology’.' 'OOO [object-oriented ontology] thinks of art not as decoration, but as the fundamental operation of cause and effect. To make an artwork is to interfere directly with the realm of causes and effects.' 'Restructuring or destructuring this logistics, which elsewhere I’ve called agrilogistics, is the one thing that would end global warming, but it is usually considered out of bounds, because it implies accepting a non-‘modern’ view, a view established on (although it thinks itself as a further disenchantment of) now ancient and obviously violent monotheisms, which in turn find their origin in the privatisation of enchantment in the Neolithic with its ‘civilisation’. We are all still Mesopotamians. We are Neolithic humans confronting the disaster the Neolithic fantasy of smoothly functioning agricultural logistics has wrought, and we want to hold on to the philosophical underpinnings of those logistics for dear life…' 'The 1970s ecofeminists were correct. We live in a death culture, an extinction culture.' 'Enchanted. What does it mean? In terms of charisma, it means some of us submitted to an energy field emitted by the sounds of the whales. The fact that this is a wholly unacceptable, beyond-the-pale way of describing what happened is a painful and delicious irony.' 'According to this view, an artwork cannot be reduced to its parts or its materials, nor can it be reduced to its creator’s life, nor to some other context, however defined (the last decade, the current geological era, the economic structure of human society, art discourse, power-knowledge – anything). And art has an actual causal effect. Art just is tampering directly with cause and effect, because art is what cause and effect actually is. Art is charisma, pouring out of anything whatsoever, whether we humans consider it to be alive or sentient or not.' 'Exposure to art should be kept to a minimum, as if it were like nuclear radiation. Such reactions actually say something deep about art, in an upside-down way: art is causal. That’s what’s frightening about it.' 'Art sprays out charismatic causality despite us. And unlike a lot of things in our current world, and within limited parameters (sophistication, taste, cost), we still let it in.'

[insurrectionaryam]

Timothy Morton, Being Ecological (UK: Pelican Books, 2018) Several thousand years from now, nothing about you as an individual will matter. But what you did will have huge consequences. This is the paradox of the ecological age. And it is why action to change global warming must be massive and collective. p.35 Humans don’t ‘have’ Dasein [mysterious being], because Dasein produces or realizes the human, in the same way that our violinist realizes the Bach sonata. p.48 

[joanaavillez]

Illustrated spread in the new 16.5” tall @interviewmag!! (Matchy matchy celadon egg for scale.) Philosopher #TimothyMorton rhapsodizes on the biosphere. https://www.instagram.com/p/BumNSk1hVah/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1jhl3y1bn4vqr

[saltsaltism]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9YHmQ6tMPM)

[matthiasmhalder]

Unlikely partnerships? British artist Rebecca Ackroyd contributed a sculpture that looks like a dropped Physalis partnering with a water bottle to survive to Damien & The Love Guru’s group show curated by Juliette Desorgues. #damienandtheloveguru #rebeccaackroyd #juliette_desorgues #contemporaryart #timothymorton #coexistence #brussels (at Damien & The Love Guru) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsoSwCcFHei/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=7zgi2jra501t

[caminodelasmonarcas]