#object oriented ontology – @nickkahler on Tumblr

We’re just trying to rearrange the deckchairs of the -isms on the Titanic of anthropocentric functioning, in that sense. Ecological architecture and art means: no more -isms! Otherwise our mountain poem becomes a me-poem mediated through mountains. We need to get at the dark underside of this -ism stuff, which is coming up close to nonhuman entities without the condom of the human-scaled fourth wall aesthetic screen. By no means does this imply that we’ll be outside of aesthetics then. It actually means that we’ve noticed that aesthetic space isn’t totally human or human-scaled.

Timothy Morton, “On Object-Oriented Ontology,” 2016

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nickkahler

I don’t actually believe in the present! I think what we have—and it’s very obvious in a large, long-term structure such as a building—is a sliding of past over future without touching. The word for this sliding is nowness and it’s a kind of relative motion that the concept of present and presence (and the metaphysics of presence) is trying to delete. Lots of Western philosophy is horribly kinephobic, terrified of motion. It seems to want to get rid of it, to explain it away, to make it incidental to how things are.

Timothy Morton, “On Object-Oriented Ontology,” 2016

#timothy morton #quote #present #belief #touching #ooo #object oriented ontology #ontology #philosophy #word #now #sliding #nowness #relative #motion #movement #kinephobic #presence #time #past #future #touch #overlap

nickkahler

Everything is haunted by its very own spider web, in fact, without any spiders, and especially not human thought, needing to be involved. To be a thing is to be haunted. The only question is, to what extent are you going to allow yourself in your process to be haunted by this spider-webby quality of how things appear? ... Buildings are haunted, not just by their past, but also by their future.

Timothy Morton, “On Object-Oriented Ontology,” 2016

#haunting #haunt #everything #timothy morton #quote #building #thought #humanity #object oriented ontology #ontology #ooo #philosophy #quality #past #time #future

nickkahler

We think of this kind of nature as a nice harmonious, periodic cycling. There’s a physical reason for that. We started our settled mode of existence (the Neolithic) at the start of the Holocene, which was characterized by nice periodic cycling Earth systems (you know, the carbon cycle and so on). The funny thing is, we might have even caused that cycling ourselves through farming and hunting and so on! But even if we didn’t, so-called civilization was (dangerously) coincident with a nice harmonious cycling biosphere that was able therefore to run in the background like a smoothly functioning OS and thus massively contributed to this idea of humans-and-their-cattle-over-here, nature-over-there. Lulled by that myth of smooth functioning, we kept on and on running the logistical program that started in the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere, until it required fossil fuels to keep going. ... So the really extreme way of putting it is, nature is the Anthropocene in its less obvious, seemingly smooth (for humans) mode.

Timothy Morton, “On Object-Oriented Ontology,” 2016

nickkahler

Architecture has since about 1900 been based on vectors of pollution flow—gotta keep the bad air out, for instance, so you need air conditioning. But when you think about things at Earth magnitude, at that scale, where does it go? It doesn’t go 'away,' it just goes somewhere else in the system. Nature, if you like, is a sort of fourth wall concept (you know theater?) by which we try to separate the human from everything else.

Timothy Morton, “On Object-Oriented Ontology,” 2016

#architecture #quote #vector #pollution #flow #instance #air conditioning #mep #magnitude #system #nature #natural #fourth wall #concept #theatre #philosophy #ontology #object oriented ontology #timothy morton

nickkahler

The house acts as one of the major sites for both the ideological articulation of “Nature” – through opposition as well as enframement – and the physical practice of it. We desire our homes to be antiseptic, isolated, and exclusively human zones. So we filter our air, spray chemicals, set out rat poison – often inadvertently poisoning ourselves in the process, like some autoimmune disorder that we’ve decided to call dwelling. In fact, this dynamic is very much at play in haunted houses of horror fiction, where pests and ghosts rebel against the imposition of domesticity.

Nicholas Korody, “On Timothy Morton and Object-Oriented Ontology,” 2016

nickkahler

Nature only seems like a given because we use it as a synonym for “everything”. But really, nature is a normative concept: it tells you how to discriminate between (say) good and bad. Natural ingredients versus unnatural (there’s a reason why they use that fake language on products). If everything is nature, then nothing can be nature – it’s a useless concept. And if nature is normative, then not everything can be nature. Some things have to be unnatural.

Timothy Morton, “On Object-Oriented Ontology,” 2016

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nickkahler

One conclusion is that things aren’t just lumps of extensional stuff decorated with accidents. How things appear is deeply intertwined with what they are. We’ve been doing real ecological violence to lifeforms on Earth on the basis of this default lump ontology, which I believe was hardwired into a certain kind of agricultural social space long before formal philosophy put it into sentences.

Timothy Morton, “On Object-Oriented Ontology,” 2016

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nickkahler

At the beginning of modernity (late 18th century), European philosophy was beginning to show that human beings are TARDISes. They contain infinities that make them qualitatively (not quantitatively) bigger than the entire universe. All OOO does is argue that this isn’t a specially human trait. Everything is like that. To exist is to be a TARDIS – and that includes sentences, poems, ideas, hallucinations, dreams… That’s our motto, in a way. 'If it exists, it’s a TARDIS.'

Timothy Morton, “On Object-Oriented Ontology,” 2016

#timothy morton #quote #beginning #modernity #european #philosophy #tardis #doctor who #infinity #big #universe #exist #ontology #object oriented ontology

nickkahler

I actually really like to think about OOO in architectural terms. You know Doctor Who, the British TV series? You know Doctor Who, this time traveling, free wheeling deus ex machina, and his machina is called the TARDIS, which stands for Time And Relative Dimensions in Space. The TARDIS is famous for being “bigger on the inside”. His companions, when they first encounter it, run around the TARDIS trying to figure out why it’s so different on the inside than the way it appears on the outside. And in fact, they go on to discover that it’s infinite on the inside. On the outside, it’s a police call box from the 1950s.

Timothy Morton, “On Object-Oriented Ontology,” 2016

#timothy morton #tardis #doctor who #deus ex machina #large #size #scale #perception #infinite #difference #discovery #interior #exterior #philosophy #ontology #object oriented ontology

nickkahler

Graham Harman, “What Objects Mean For Architecture,” 2013 (via archinect)

#graham harman #philosophy #video #lecture #talk #object oriented ontology #object #ontology #presentation