Definition-objects In this two part essay I want to interrogate how objects contribute to defining humanity? According to Tristan Garcia in his comprehensive and unique Form and Object (2014), ‘Present day humanity’s relations to animals and to artefacts makes us hopelessly attempt to prove what humanity is as an object’ (238). The ‘hopeless’ is indicative…
Read MoreClimate Emergency+Corona Emergency=Chronic Emergencies
In Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (2020), Swedish academic Andreas Malm explains how the primary catalyst of the pandemic is the deforestation of wildlife habitats. Deforestation has squeezed the once yawning gap between wildlife habitats and human civilisation, paving the way for pathogens to embed themselves in human societies. Malm’s…
Read MoreCOVID AND WORLD RISK SOCIETY
WHAT IS WORLD RISK SOCIETY? World Risk Society (1999) is a book of sociological theory written by German academic Ulrich Beck. Written at the dawn of the new Millennium, it has been an influential text, being regularly referred to by theorists working in environmentalism and ecological philosophy (Morton). I even suspect his language is used…
Read MoreGetting a little help “phasing” in & out of things with ‘Everything’
In my previous post I explained a little about Tim Morton’s term phasing, which is a sort of abstract toggle function we can utilize whilst going-about-our-business, to create our own context explosions. Understanding context explosions enables us to think more about the potential trajectory of something, anything, everything. Only a few days after my previous…
Read MorePhasing in & out of Subscendent Wholes
My dissertation has been handed in & now I am flooded with mild anxiety. It hadn’t really occurred to me that most people write about authors long deceased. John Wedgewood Clarke is very much alive and active; as are the sources I cite, in large part. Only Heidegger & Derek Parfit are the exceptions. This…
Read MoreThe “Spectrality” of Phytoplankton in John Wedgewood Clarke’s Landfill
In Landfill, poet John Wedgewood Clarke takes the reader on walks along the trekking paths of some of England’s most outstanding areas of natural beauty. One such area is the Greensand Way connecting Surrey and Kent. Clarke, choice picks this location owing to a property of its geological composition: it is made of chalk. Landscapes…
Read MoreAn Introduction to Levi R. Bryant’s Virtual Proper Being
In The Democracy of Objects Levi R. Bryant explains that …the substantiality of objects is not a bare substratum, but rather an absolutely individual system or organization of powers. Powers are the capacities of an object or what it can do. The powers of an object are never something that is directly manifested in the…
Read MoreDimethyltryptamine
Recently I was provided the opportunity to smoke DMT, one of the most confounding & intense experiences of my life. It is difficult to reconcile the out of body, death-like experience with the simplicity of this ubiquitous compound, found in mammal brains & numerous plants, including acacia. I felt death. On coming out of the…
Read MoreThoughts on Self-Interest Ecology
This week I have been reading a not-so well-known book of philosophy by the British philosopher Derek Parfit called Reasons and Persons. Parfit is flagged up in Tim Morton’s Hyperobjects, in which Morton comments on Parfit’s challenging of ‘long-held prejudices about utility and ethics from within utilitarianism itself.’ that, ‘Parfit showed that no self-interest ethical…
Read Morebetween noisescapesilence
Haven’t written a poem for a while, but this has emerged in the last few weeks. Very much a sensory response manifesting out of my studies into my actual encounters & affiliation with a world of objects, object-sound, object-smell, object-taste. between noisescapesilence the extractor fan in the bathroom is too loud its loudness…
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