Timothy Morton

I grew up in London. The first few years of my life were actually spent around the corner from what was then called the Apple Boutique, which was not run by Apple, but was run by The Beatles. My mum used to take me there in the pram with the hopes of seeing Paul McCartney. She met Jane Asher in the laundrette down the street. And it was the time when they did that show on the roof, so you never know. I remember the view not from my window, but from my pram. These very ornate 18th, 19th century columns. My parents were effectively squatting in a flat that had been donated to them in a very posh part of London, near Harley Street. They couldn't have afforded to actually live there. At the time my dad was transcribing music for a living, and doing the orchestral arrangement for Nina Simone's “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black.”

I’ve never been asked that before.

My father's parents lived on a farm in the northwest of England, in the Lake District where Wordsworth and Coleridge hung out. So a lot of it was there. But actually, the first thing that really hit me was on vinyl. It was the whale songs from the mid-70s—Songs of the Humpback Whale was one of the albums. Deep Voices was another, where they sped up a blue whale several times so you could actually hear the subsonic singing. And then there was this book published by UNESCO called SOS Save the Earth in 1972, which distressingly contained every single fact that we now know to be true and still haven't done anything about. It was a book for kids, with postcards you could cut out and write to your local MP. It deeply affected me. I still have it.

And then there was the Wimbledon Common. In Britain, there are these common lands held over from the Middle Ages where you could graze your sheep if you were a peasant. There was this TV show called The Wombles. They were muppet-like animated creatures who lived on the Common and created things out of the rubbish people threw around, because it was the ‘70s and you just threw stuff away. When there was a drought in 2006, the soil turned to sand and all these ring pulls from the 1970s started appearing.

I use my inner life as a lab to work with things. I grew up adjacent to a crime syndicate, a London mafia called the Twins. The world I was born into wasn't changing, it was already shattered. The feeling in some of my work, that the end of the world has already happened, is exactly how it looks in hindsight. I was just getting used to surviving. When you're in survival mode, you don't even know about the world. It's too much. My survival tactic was to get every single ‘A’ known to humanity and get the heck out of my family, and then get the heck out of the UK.

To say my childhood was unstable isn't quite right. It was more like I was walking out of an explosion that I had no idea had even happened. And this is coincident with the way people are experiencing what's going on now. There's this dread of something imminent, which I feel is actually a way of blocking a reality that has already occurred. Accepting this would involve a lot of grief work. But when you look at cultures that are doing real grief work, they don't have any time to take over the world. Which is why they didn't do the things that white people did to fuck it up for everybody else.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was some? I've been banging on for decades about how most environmentalist thinking, writing, doing, interviewing, TV appearing, and use of science is one-dimensional. It's 1D. It's not even 2D. Could it at least have some slight self-awareness—a slight smile? The plastic frog protestor has that silly face. That's so much more than I've ever seen in the world of environmental speech.

When I first started saying that, I got death threats. Then I got ignored. And now I hear people coming to my classes to talk about ecological propaganda. “How do we get climate into movies?” The Bechdel test has so many dimensions to it. It's very simple to say, but complex to mean. Whereas just asking whether there’s a character in the movie who cares about global warming? That doesn’t hold any impact. It's 2025 and we still think that if we just put a few people who mention global warming into a movie, then everything will change.

There's this very white, Enlightenment-period idea that if people just knew this transparent truth, they would automatically get it. Whereas the so-called wrong side understands the effect of propaganda. Propaganda is just a dirty word for art, or art is a dirty word for propaganda. The jury is out on which is the dirty word for which. Martin Luther King didn't waste any time begging people to believe that we’d be better off if Black people and white people got along. He was a highly trained minister, so he stood up in front of a million people and said, “I have a dream.” He's already won. Everyone's visualizing something in the future. “I have a dream.” It's so vulnerable.

Where is the texture of being a life form that grew out of a biosphere? It's hidden away in the esoteric feeling of actually being an embodied being. Everyone will hear this and go, “he's just trying to say we need old-fashioned deep ecology.” But irony—does anyone understand irony? Irony, ambiguity, beauty. These are evidence of being a life form.

Everything comes with a way of being handled. You pick up a hammer by its handle, you hold a steering wheel this way, you roll the joint like this or you're not going to get high. And ideas also come with ways of being handled. Even truth itself has a feel—a truth-feel. PR companies tell us that chips have mouth-feel. The word "mouth-feel" has a really bad mouth feel, by the way. We talk about the ring of truth because there's this intuition that it’s right. I’m with Kant on this one. Beauty is the feel of true. It's not cooked up by my ego, and yet I can feel it. We now know that affect is a transpersonal thing, and to some extent it's because we're dealing with the feel of a logical structure we haven’t fully grasped. It's as if it's from the future. Even if nobody got it, it would still be true. That quality of, “I am ready to undergo the possibility that I might be wrong, and yet I could know it to be true.”

When Einstein writes “E=mc²,” he knows it might be wrong in 200 years, or in two weeks. And that doesn't mean it's not true. True is fragile, and yet also very powerful. In a funny way, true is from the future. And the future has this shimmery, evaporating quality—you almost can't see it. You can see the past everywhere. It's all solidity, concatenated around you. You look in the mirror, you see all the stuff that happened to your face. Whereas the future has this “oh, what, uh” sort of thing. So beauty is therefore ambiguous. It's universal, but it might in the end be less true.

That is so beautiful.

Newton’s theory is still true if you want to slingshot around the moon, but not if you want to go at the speed of light. And yet the ambiguity is not vague. The ambiguity is how accuracy feels. Ambiguity is an accuracy signal. When you're at the eye doctor, after half an hour of "number one or number two," you arrive at an impossible choice between two equally slightly bad solutions. You have a choice between two equally valid interpretations of your eyes. What does it mean? You have an accurate prescription. Ambiguity signals accuracy. The ability to see two or three sides to a thing is when you know you're hitting the accuracy level, as opposed to, “this is my truth and if you don't believe it I'll talk at you until you agree.” Which is the violence level.

And irony! It's ironic that something can be true but also less true in the future. Irony is the feel of contradiction. Like the optical illusion of the beautiful woman and the old woman. You can't have both, but they're there. Very low-level irony is sarcasm, that I'm saying one thing but mean another, and you know which I mean. With very high-level irony, you can't tell anymore. This sentence is false. If it's true, it's false; if it's false, it's true. Irony is the feel of contradiction, and things—sentences, galaxies, soccer teams, this interview—if real, are always different from how they appear. And since that's the case, reality itself is ironic. Irony is a reality signal.

Here's an interesting sociological fact: Some 80% of Americans know global warming is real and caused by human beings. Please don't yell at me. Please don't go on television with that scientific fact, because the moment you do, it's no longer a scientific fact. You took something from Nature or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and put it in a studio with anchors and lighting and makeup. Now it's a belief, and you're putting the viewer in a belief competition. You're telling them, “if you don't accept this, if you don't swap your belief in Jesus for my belief in the climate crisis, something very bad will happen.” And unfortunately that person is not going to do that. You know why? “Jesus loves me anyway.” Why would they let that go? Before you even started, you took a scientific fact and translated it into a religious dogma. You lost.

I'll say it because I get paid to say the uncomfortable things. Even the most unflattering version of "Jesus loves me anyway" is better than, “if we don't propitiate this entity, all these bad things will happen.” Joe Truckdriver is going to correctly hear that as pagan idolatry and correctly reject it. And we aren’t going to get anywhere until people like me realize that Joe Truckdriver is above the level I'm thinking at — not down, up. Until I can talk to mercy and forgiveness and belief and faith. Until I can have a conversation about what “to believe” even means. Does it mean a competition where you swap these things for each other? Can beliefs overlap and contradict? I would rather have that conversation on television than hear a thousand more factoids.

Well, one of us said it correctly.

The very framing of the question is a symptom of what it's done. It implies there's this entity called nature. Where is it? Maybe it's under my shirt. Maybe it's in my DNA. Maybe it's in the meadow opposite. Maybe it's from a very long time ago when human beings frolicked in the wilderness, or maybe it's over there on holiday in the wilderness right now. But basically, it's over there somewhere, acting as a background stage set to whatever's going on right here.

Whenever I use the word "nature," I am propagating the meme that separates human beings from all other life forms. I've been campaigning for years: ecology without nature. When you have ecological awareness, what disappears is the very concept of nature. You can now distinguish between natural and unnatural, between natural and artificial. It's obviously weaponized from the get-go. It's about separating human beings' built space from everything around it. As Oscar Wilde said of nature: “Who would want to go there? It's nasty and wet and swarming with horrible insects.”

A hyperobject is a thing so large in both time and space, compared to a human being, that a human being can't see it directly. Particularly if they're part of it, or grew out of it. I grew out of a biosphere. I can't see it directly or completely. There's an underside, a flipside, a shadow side to things.

It's great to have a word for something. Like Rumpelstiltskin, once you know the name of the demon, you can do something about it. There wasn’t a word for these beings, so it's handy just to have one. There's a kind of feel to the word that does to you what the concept actually does. It's this big word, “hyper” meaning “beyond” and “object” meaning “thing.” I was writing The Ecological Thought and trying to imagine, what would all the styrofoam ever made look like? An Edward Burtynsky photograph going on for hundreds of years, across the entire world, every crumpled cup. It's a thing, an object in some crude sense, but it goes way beyond any understanding of what an object could be. So it's a hyperobject.

For several thousand years, Europeans have imagined the afterlife as a kind of concentration camp that goes on forever, called hell or called heaven. Heaven is just hell for nice people. So hyperobject is a cool-kid word for hell. Artists started doing work based on it, and I'll say it: a lot of that hyperobject art is incredibly one-dimensional. It’s mostly data collection. There are people who can collect data and interpret it better. They're called scientists. What most hyperobject art does is just produce a large chunk of statistics, which isn’t really getting at the hyperobject aspect. It's actually part of hell. Hell is a place where everything has a very distinct, extremely one-dimensional label. Everything in hell announces one thing and one thing only. That's actually your first reaction to knowing you live on Earth. “Oh my god, I'm in hell.” But it's not all bad all the way through. And the very idea that everything is bad is a symptom of how you're perpetuating it.

It's a word and a philosophy that allows people to generate more than data and one-dimensional responses to data — to actually start living global warming. Because these hyperobjects aren't concentration camps. They're very, very large, and they're overlapping. You can be part of global capitalism and part of the biosphere at the same time. “Oh, so my whole idea that there's one-size-fits-all meaning to things isn't quite right.” I'm now writing a book called Paradise. Subtitle: “Living the Hyperobject.” Once you realize you live in hell, you have one choice. You can make paradise, or not.

Paradise is scalable in a way that hell isn't. The hyperobject is multi-level, and that's part of the horror. Something happening at this level means something very different at another level. I'm starting my car, that's nothing bad. Billions of those? Catastrophic. At the individual level, even when I'm trying not to do it, I'm doing it. And I'm paralyzed. Whereas paradise is a place that's the same size, whether it's a lovely conversation between two people, a nice meal for your friends, or a new society. It's the same shape. The beginning of every Samuel Beckett play is the beginning of paradise. Because on a trash heap, that toothbrush is no longer a toothbrush. It's something else, a bit less than a toothbrush. The styrofoam cup is a styrofoam cup for five minutes, and then it's something else. Which is not nature, because you’re aware of it.

To put it in James Baldwin’s terms, you have to go through hell to get there. The hell of feeling like the worst object, the embodiment of everybody's negative feelings they’ve planted inside you about who you are. You can’t reject it. You have to go through it and realize. The idea of a subject that floats above all this, that command-and-control stance that I can just fly above it or destroy it, that's the problem. So if we're going beyond master and slave, which means beyond subject and object, we must accept this objection. “Fuck, we've only ever been living on a trash heap. Now what?”

I'm so influenced by The Wombles. The Wimbledon Common is covered in trash. Now what? Now we live on this trash heap. What are we going to do? We could build a house. We could build a playground. You were only ever making things out of trash. You've just shifted your perspective to live the world you're actually in.

That's what I think theory does, Russell. Theory is you trying to change the future before it happens. By changing the way people talk about things, you're changing meaning. And changing meaning is a lot less violent than blowing up a pipeline—but it's also everything.

You said something earlier about it being incredible that we can even imagine the future. It's also incredible that we can remember. A memory is an output of a brain, and a brain is an output of a biosphere. And your brain can superpose—I use this quantum word deliberately—something that isn't here, that happened, onto your present-moment experience. How does that even happen? The basic memory is remembering that you forgot something. Did we have this conversation before? Déjà vu. We think of it as an anomaly, but in a way it's the atomic structure of all awareness. How can you know you forgot something you don't know? Because that forgotten something is in the future. You don't know yet what you forgot.

You can be in the middle of a fight and suddenly think, “wait a minute, why am I wailing on this person?” This is just mechanical repetition, this revenge cycle. And you hesitate. That's isometric with, “I remember that I forgot.” And to me, that's the atomic structure of mercy. Mercy and forgiveness are hardwired into being a life form. When people say “forgive and forget,” the mechanism is actually the opposite. It's forget and forgive. Wait, why are we even doing this? Just forget it. The imagination is seizable. It's perfectly possible to build another world, to seize the means of production of that world, which is the imagination.

I'm fascinated by an almost completely unknown ex-Marxist philosopher called Cornelius Castoriadis, who has an idea very similar to William Blake that there’s a social imaginary that has been repressed. One of the ways it's repressed is in the notion of theory in a pejorative sense, that I’ve got the right way of looking at the world, and if you don’t see it my way, you’re a bit of a loser. Marxism did this. “Get with the program of historical change or be part of the wreckage.” It's dictating rather than helping liberate people to be as creative as they actually can be.

This creativity is deeply wired in. Take proprioception. Worms are aware of the tunnels they're digging, otherwise they wouldn't be able to dig them. But how don’t they get stuck? They can create an inverted image of the tunnel. My sense of head, shoulders, knees and toes is just my environmental awareness turned inside out. And my environmental awareness is always slightly late to the biospheric party, because chemical signals take a bit of time. My sense of myself is out of joint with my sense of environment, which is out of joint with the actual environment. And that feeling of being embedded—which feels like transcending it, or being dislocated from it, or being separate from it—is how you know that you're not. The sense of separation is the proof of connection.

Don’t worry about creating anything. Meditate on the fact that you can even remember something. People are more important than the ideas they have. That’s not a fortune cookie. To be a person is to be magically, fractally, infinitely less than a highfalutin idea. People are better than the ideas they have.

I've never had an idea. Words and things have just popped into my head. It's all about listening and attending. That binary we have, active versus passive, is part of the subject-object, master-slave duality. In Greek there was a middle voice that wasn't between active and passive. It was called the middle in Latin, which is already a symptom of the problem, because it's not in between. The Greek phaínesthai—to appear—you can't tell if it's active or passive. Euangelízesthai—to evangelize—you can't evangelize anybody. Whether it's a religious kind of evangelism or forcing someone to believe an environmental factoid, it's a middle-voice thing. What does it mean? It means it's a compulsion. Environmental or spiritual Tourette's syndrome. You just can't help getting it out. And other people might catch on, precisely because you're not trying to push it into their heads.

To seize the means of social production is to realize that human beings dreamt all this stuff up and we can undream it and dream up something else. Then you say it, and immediately it gets caught in ideology. And people start to think I’m some corporate PR guy. Love and forgiveness will never change the world. But what if they actually could? Because these things relate to very basic processes within a life form that have to do with connecting to other life forms. And so the bigger you get, the smaller and more intimate you have to look for solutions. The planet-scale stuff isn't bigger than me and doesn't cancel me out. It's actually the most fulfilling. I'm a real boy! That's so much more than being American or French or Brazilian.

To be prompted to feel differently, or to feel at all, is something that inspires me about what you're doing. You're creating what Raymond Williams called structures of feeling. Ideology is calcified structures of feeling that have already taken shape, whereas structures of feeling are how to live your world from the future. It hasn't happened yet. Everything I learned about ecology I learned on the dance floor in 1988. There was a structure of feeling about it—evanescent, evaporating, misty. Is it there? Is it not there? Ambiguous. And the ambiguity was its power.

So you're creating this thing called Geographer. Part of its power is that it is a structure of feeling rather than a concatenated set of beliefs. The bit that's missing—what you could call spirit, if you were so inclined, what some might call the Holy Spirit—has to do with that “can you feel it” quality. Martin Luther King saying, "I have a dream." The Martin Luther King sample in Mr. Fingers's "Can You Feel It" remains my favourite piece of dance music. It's a feeling. He's creating a structure of feeling. He's creating a portal to another dimension you can walk through. Can you feel it?

How do we bottle that and show it to people? Wouldn't it be incredible if the eco person could turn to the camera and go: Can you feel it? That would be so much more than anything ever done.

I’d like to be put in one of my friend Jae Rhim Lee's mushroom death suits. I’ve put this in my will. They’re impregnated with mushrooms that I must train to enjoy eating my tissue. Then you put me in one of her flat-pack cardboard coffins and two days later I am a huge box of mushrooms. That seems to me the most polite way of dying. I used to think, just chop me up and leave me to sky burial. But the vultures can still swallow the mercury in your body. So, yes, being digested by mushrooms. And someone can eat them. Whatever. That's on the to-do list.