 Ac, o ran ychydig, mae'r cyflodd yn fwyaf i gael i'r Cymraeg Cymru 2021 ar gyfer y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell. Rwy'n ddod i'r byw ychydig. John Fawcett yn ymddangos gyda'r cyflodd ar y Llyfrgell, ac mae'r cyflodd yn ymddangos gwybod. Yr hyn yn ymddangos gan Gareth Devins, ac mae'r chyfyddiad ar y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell. Llyfrgell yw bydd y clywb bod y bydd ymddangos i'n llei'r cyflodd. The work began playing at the turn of the millennium and was created by Gem Finer and produced by Art Angel. It's housed here in the lighthouse at Trinity Boywalth in the London Doclins and is modeled on the singing bowls you can see behind me. Not only is it a remarkable piece of sonic art. It's also a way of thinking, of a framework for measuring how we are in the world and how we might be in the future. A very uncertain future, of course, as we all know. Mae'n meddwl o'r reisio, o'r mhreiddiadau, o'r rhai olyw ar yr hyn o'r gwahanol, o'r ffawr o'r ddidentityg, o'r ffawr o'r societau i'r wneud o'r sefydliadau. Mae'r Ffawr Thu'r Fawr yn ysgrifennu a'r gwybod o'r ffawr o'r wahanol, oherwydd raw'r ddyn nhw'n ceisio gweithio roedd y fawr yn cael ei gwybod a oedden nhw'n ceisio'n ceisio ar y mewn cyfathau. Mae hynny ond, ymgyrchyniad, o'rnynt sicrhau mor ffordd o Llwcianiaeth yn y gyfroyd digwydd, yn gynrychiwch ac yn ymgyrch yn y ffordd. Ychydig y mynd i gilydd y c ihanol i ddechrau o gweithiau gweithliadau a'r gweithlfestau. Yn mynd i'n cyfan gweithlau o'r gweithliadau mewn cyfan gwaith sydd yn dwylo yn 2005 o'r Gweithliadysgol Gweithliadad, ar y Gweithliadau ym Llyfrgell. I spoil the lighthouse, where I am standing now, to see long player in action and the supporting material around me. But most all, you can listen to long player, here in the lighthouse or online ofcourse at longplayer.org or via the app. The conversation has been running as I said since 2005 and we are really delighted to have two wonderful guests among the most innovative and engaged thinkers of our time to think through the very issues that I've just raised. One of the ways you can support Longplayer, which receives no call funding to enable these events to go onward into the future and of course for Longplayer itself to continue to play, is to support it in the various ways and means that you might know, but particularly and distinctively through the buying time project in which you can sponsor a day, any day from the calendar year for yourself or for a loved one and leave a trace of that support in the buying time cabinet here at the lighthouse in the London Dockland. More on that at the end when I will return to manage the questions which you can file through the online form of this platform and they will be passed to me to relay to our wonderful guests in due course. But now let me remind you of who our wonderful guests are. We are delighted to welcome of course the artist, the author and the academic Denise Ferreira de Silva and the scholar, writer and cultural collaborator Timothy Morton. They will be talking about social and ecological justice, about deep time, about the Anthropocene and about exactly what we have been mentioning already, Longplayer and how it can think for us about these crucial issues which really are at the heart of our societal future. I'm very very glad that you can be with us for this very special conversation and now please wherever you are, do join me in welcoming Denise Ferreira de Silva and Timothy Morton. Well hello everybody. I'm so deeply honoured and touched to be part of this conversation with my good friend Denise. We've known each other for about four years, but let me introduce myself first and then Denise will introduce herself. When I do this normally I say something like hello my name is Tim and I write sentences about ecological awareness which makes me sound like I'm in alcoholics anonymous or something. But in general people call me a philosopher although I wouldn't dare to call myself that actually. I would say though is that the word philosophy is actually made of two emotions you know it's the word love and the word wisdom. And if you had a choice between, you know wisdom is a series of ideas on a fortune cookie, or wisdom is a feeling I think you would have to go with wisdom is a feeling. I think that this is not normal you know like like normal regular philosophers are all about having really big ideas and you know comparing that the big ideas with the other people's big ideas but for some reason I, I can't do that, or I won't do that. And for me the philosophy is all about movement, you know the word emotion implies a kind of movement. It's like you're driving down the wisdom street, and there are the lamp posts and the lamp posts are called ideas but you don't want to like concentrate on them too hard otherwise you might wrap yourself around one. At least that's that's my sense of things. Let me introduce you to Denise he's going to tell tell you guys a little bit about herself. Hi, hello, hi Tim. Thanks for introducing me and for this conversation so I am. I am an academic, I think I've been for a while now, and also practicing artist. My philosophy is also part of my, of my craft, but I, maybe I don't, I get at it from the other way, which is not an opposite ways just another way through the thinking. And I, and through the thinking from the thinking about something very or apparently minute to the think of things so abstract that no one really cares about about them. Perhaps they say they don't care about them. So, and that, and that move from the minute to, you know, to the very abstract is present and informed. All the work I do from the films in collaboration with Arjuna Neumann through the sensing salon practice with Valentine's Day, but but also that collaborative practice that we, you know, have in the classroom with graduate and undergraduate students. But there I am mostly interested in, you know, getting them to exercise that they're thinking, and their curiosity, and then, and hopefully bring some element that they have not had not considered before so they can continue and amplify and, you know, narrow what expand the conversations they engage in however they wish. Now, Denise and I have prepared a little plan for this evening. And I feel like it might be Denise's turn to ask me a question that I'm going to address and then I'll ask Denise something and we'll proceed from that. How do you feel about that Denise. I feel like it's an excellent way of going about it, especially because the question I have for you is about thinking. It is about the trajectory of your thinking but let me quote from ecology without nature, which was published what 14 years ago I think a while ago isn't it. And, and I would like to quote from from that book because it's been very important in my own way into ecological thinking. But then that is something about the thinking itself so I'm quoting from page 12. Instead of lumping together a list of things and dubbing it to nature, the aim is to slow down and take the list apart and to put into question the idea of making a list at all. Ecology without nature takes seriously the idea that truly theoretical reflection is possible, only if thinking decelerates. It's not the same thing as becoming numb or stupid. It's finding anomalies paradoxes and conundrums in an otherwise smooth looking stream of ideas. So I thought that it would be great to start the conversation with, you know you're commenting on the trajectory of your thinking since ecology without nature. How has it moved? How is it translated? What have you got? And I'm asking because right now that is the sense of urgency, right, the sense of very little time or no time, and of being out of time being too late in regards to addressing global warming. And at the same time that is the long player, which is going to be playing for so many, many, many years to come. How is your thinking between right now or maybe too late and then this expense of a thousand years that the long player will be with us? Well, thank you so, thank you so much. That's a beautiful question. And, you know, when I say decelerate, I'm taking the advice of my old friend Jack Delida, who used to say to his graduate students that the most important thing is to slow down. And of course, since then, actually, I feel like my thinking has slowed down even more. To some extent, I was kind of skimming over some things when I wrote that book, Denise, and a little bit that was because I wanted to get published to be honest with you that it was important to get through some kind of metal detector into the VIP lounge of being a published author on this topic. And I knew that the people who would be assessing the book for Harvard University Press might have some thoughts about me being very harsh on this concept of nature. So I was trying super hard to be a little bit gentle and oblique. And so part of it is that the thinking is slowed down and it's more kind of like feet feeling my way along now more intuitively. So that the feeling and the thought has gotten louder and louder and louder. Let's cut to the chase ending white supremacy in patriarchy are logically foundational to any progressive ecological project that is something that I firmly believe, and I strongly feel like people like me should talk a lot less actually right now about about non human beings. So we want to call them and talk more about these issues. I also feel like black lives matter is the one of the very first planet scale movements of collective political awareness and action as is me too, actually, and that this is very good news because you know just in time for collective political awareness and action to be happening on on the climate catastrophe. We have something in the world that is just as big as transnational corporation, or transnational religion, both of which in their ways are responsible for some of the big problems that we in which we find ourselves. And so, if anything, my way of thinking about things got sort of louder, you know, and I just started just kind of, oh, let's just say what I need to say and that's funny Denise because I had a post it note on my computer when I was writing ecology without nature that basically said, just tell people what you think, because I was one of these very, very, you know, trying to be right academics, you know, and like every sentence had to be perfect and every sentence had to be right and therefore there was only about three people who read my stuff and I could hardly get the words out, you know, and so I decided I would just try to say what I really thought more directly and make myself a little bit more kind of vulnerable there but even though I'd been a bit careful publishing that book. I did actually receive amazingly I got death threats for saying that ecology should be without nature that some people actually thought this Tim doesn't believe in dolphins he doesn't think they're real and the point is I believe in them so much. This concept of nature is actually the thing that's getting in the way. Nature, as it were, is normative in other words it means that there has to be something unnatural to define it, as it were, and I feel again like in particular white supremacy and patriarchy are structuring this binary opposition between human beings and so called nature. And that the job of something like deconstruction for my point of view is to sort of discover that the line between these two things is actually very, very thick. It's not thin and rigid, and actually it contains all kinds of strange anomalies that make that binary on tenable. So I was sort of doing that in a way that would get seen by my wonderful editor actually Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press. And then gradually since then just getting more and more explicit another thing that it was about was like, let's do some cognitive mapping like Frederick Jameson was saying you know let's just find out what the hell is actually going on before we figure out what. And it seemed to me that left ways of talking about this was somehow stuck in all kinds of issues and I know that we share deep negative thoughts actually about about Hegel, for example, who is often I feel impeded the discussion as far as this goes. And this actually leads me to my to my question for you, Denise, which is that you know this idea of transparency, I teach this concept of yours all the time. Because I feel like it's key to actually understanding how how speciesism is actually deeply structured by racism and that your argument in fact that any subject object dualism is always a master slave duality. Has become for me an incredibly powerful way of thinking about human relations with with non human beings. And how concepts such as the inhuman or the subhuman are sort of structuring this binary so I was wondering if you could say a few words about that in in turn. Yes, well, thank you so much for for the answer to my question. It's, it's amazing to see how, you know, our thinking, how it responds to challenges that sometimes they have always been there and sometimes they, they just take a different, you know, a different shape as as they appear to. And I'm kind of saying that because even my thinking with the notion of transparency has changed that a little bit since 2007 also went toward the global idea of race was was published. And, and I think the shift was also very much influenced by by post structuralism and but but the shift even within, you know, my how I have been influenced by post structuralism. So, when I introduced these phrase, the transparent eye into order global idea of race and thinking primarily as the figuring of of man in the, you know, at the beginning of the 19th century, I was still very much influenced, or maybe not influenced. I was still very much thinking with Michelle Foucault on the one hand, and attempting to understand that passage or to convey that passage from what Foucault calls the classical order to what he calls the modern epstein. And that was a refiguring that in that passage that was a refiguring the subject from what to the winter calls man man one the rational being and to what she calls man to which is the selected by evolution. But what I saw in that passage in with Hegel, with Hegel intervention was precisely that transformation of the rational entity which was separated from everything else as nature, right. Into something that was confounded with everything else with nature itself because nature, nature, right this normative thing you're mentioning nature was we, we defined as being, but that that the subject in the moment when it doesn't yet know that it is a manifestation of spirit. So that was what I was looking at at that moment, but over the many, you know, the many years between then and now, as I will, I spent more time attending to. Not so much at not more time attending to but as I kind of expanded my attention to racial segregation from primarily each juridical moment writing of my focus have has been for a long time on police brutality. As I moved from police brutality and started to looking more at human rights at the whole human rights framework and the ways in which that framework has been deployed in as in a way as a mechanism of global subjugation and we can talk more about that. Then I found that in a deep that then it was the notion of cultural cultural difference that it had even more of a fundamental role in the limiting the reach of humanity itself as as an ethical principle. So then, then I moved more towards the division approach. And more, more towards the division approach in particular. No, I became obsessed with something that everybody says I think is in the force of law about justice. If such a thing exists. And I became obsessed with the, with the, the move towards the asking, instead of asking, you know, of stating if such a thing exists, considering more of the impossibility of such a thing as justice as global justice as of such a thing as social justice, global justice, racial justice, but precisely because the concept that animates our notion of justice humanity. Is it's not on not only it really figures that know that is of transparency humanity is still the transparent I, but in addition to that, as it works with the tools of raciality. And also, we, we produces these orders, right, which will, you know, this other varieties of humans, but then at the same time be producing that distinction between the human and nature which is so crucial to ecological thinking, right, is, which is, as you, that which you refer with the term species. Well, you know this concept of justice brings up the notion of the future, you know, then then maybe there's two different kinds of future on the table roughly that's the future that we can predict. And then there's the possibility of the future the possibility that things can be different and. Oh my goodness, we are living in a moment in which we could really use some sense that the future could be different from the past because you know look around you the capitalism and so forth is munching down the biosphere to nothing. And people need a sense of things could be different that in fact there are alternative ways of being inside deeply respect anybody who wants to hold open this doorway or this gateway. And yet to me that it's free. It's beautiful how you put it like the possibility of justice in a way is is is more. What's the right word fertile or creative than any instance of justice. This kind of goes all the way back to Plato and the way that he made me knows head explode by saying you know you're just giving me an example of justice whereas in fact this is a concept that transcends, but then on the other hand it can't transcend this world otherwise we wouldn't be able to enacted at all. And so it's a beautiful paradoxical and very important concept I feel and you know if long player means anything it has to do with opening up the possibility that things can be different, rather than repeating the same. I'm hoping that people will be able to visualize the future, even visualize anything would be good right now things are so sort of beaten down I took a lot to the extinction rebellion youth and they feel like very very upset all the time and it like like how to help people, all people feel like they can get out of bed in the morning and actually do something in the name of this justice. Well, it's good you brought extinction rebellion and and the issue of time right because justice as as as a concept, it's out of time, but it isn't time. It is justice is to come. Right, but it's, but because it's to come it isn't time and it is also to come in the space into the place in which we are. But in now in this moment, you know as we as we're facing more more seriously and more, you know, it's almost impossible not to to pay attention to global warming. This sense of urgency, Rob's time right there is no time as as I was as I was saying before. So what what then what then becomes possible when that is no time not because there is no time in the present, but because that is no that is no future that is no way of anticipating something like a future. So, so to me then the challenge becomes one of bringing about now this moment living on the planet, changing the ways in which we exist on this planet in this moment from the minor ways, microwaves to the major macro imaginable ways. Right now. Right. Yeah. And and and every so if it is right now then that urgency might, you know if we bring that that that future to this moment, then that urgency will no longer be something that in a way tends to to stop you right because, because you for humans when there is no time there is nothing to be done. But if it is about now, then that is always something that can be done. I love how you're thinking on a number of different scales of time and space at the same at the same moment. Right and how these different scales don't cancel each other out necessarily even though they're a little bit different from each other and it makes me think about your concept of a fractal thinking versus linear thinking. It's a suggestive essay that you shared with me and you know that people have become super linear, you know, like we were talking a few weeks ago about how there was a tropical storm that rolled into Houston and I went to the supermarket and you know that with these young white men who have never seen in the supermarket before. And they're piling the trolleys full of all the stuff including the toilet paper, but it included it sort of occurred to me that this toilet paper was a symbol not only for maintaining this barrier between the inside and the outside but also a kind of enactment of the primitive accumulation right like let's just get this huge pile of things, and then we can automate it, and that this is what people default to that white supremacy defaults to. My friend Amitav Ghosh is thinking that the, it's the colonial imperial aspect of capitalism that's the key problem with it and it and your concept of fractal thinking seemed to me to be trying to find a way to think outside of that of that box in terms of in terms of time and space and so I wondered if you might be able to speak speak to that a little bit Denise. Yes. So fractal thinking is an idea that came to me as I got a little bit irritated with with some contemporary philosophers who will go remain unnamed as they were commenting on the European refugee crisis like about five, six years ago. And they repeated these hours general know you know understanding of time as not only as linear but then at the same time as, you know, as as made out of those different moments, and then once something stops, then it's, it's ended and it stays in the past. So there is something called colonialism. And then it went away. It's there. No irrelevant. There is something called slavery. It ends. What's that? And, and I, I am absolutely unable to see things stop, you know, to to to inhabit these particular, you know, sense of time. So that was that that was that invitation and then at the same time, I, as we are going to probably talk more about it, I, you know, I am, I have been so totally into science fiction on the one hand, and the whole idea of time travel is very crucial in my thinking. And then on the other hand, I have spent the last 30 years or more reading on on on partial physics and quantum field theory and then of course this is all part of part of my thinking so as I was attending to how these these philosophers are describing the refugee crisis as if, you know, something that just happened in the Middle East and in the African continent and that had nothing to do with the history of colonialism and new colonialism and imperialism. I just started considering like one base simple what if question. And the what if question wise, like, okay, right. Maybe there is no way to stop people from having this idea of the historic as you know something happened, and that something else happens, you know, and then they connect to each other but that is no continuation maybe it is impossible to, to, to eliminate that kind of thinking. At the same time, it is difficult, like to let go of this idea of a life, you know, of the duration of our life of the life as an organic phenomenon. So maybe as humans living entities on this planet, we do, you know, experience, at least not not the life of the species but the life of the individual this this makes a difference. But then there is no reason why not to include also some other dimensions into the thinking and doing so simultaneously, you know, and those dimensions would be the quantum. Right, we are all made out of those elementary particles of those things that have been recycling for you know millions and millions of years. And, and the cosmic, which, you know, of the cosmic of space, as the site of, you know, quote unquote origin of all of that of all of those particles. So the proposal for fact of thinking is, is just that right, it is an acknowledgement of the fact that you know you can't undo the ways humans think about or approach existence, but we can and should not think in terms of scales, right. The complication is about thinking it all at the same time as being the same scale the same thing. So, but well now that we are talking about time and and the fractal thinking. I, I do, I have a, I have a question for you about thinking right, because I'm very much interested in in what you I see you describing, we've described as liquid thinking. I mean you talk, you talk about fluid fluid fluid space, but, and then here I'm obviously commenting on on spacecraft, which is, which is a book that I like very much. And then I just mentioned to you not. Yeah, before we started that I, you know, I spent more time with Star Trek, so the reference to Star Wars I had to remember them but it's still we're like in the same thing, but I also love the fact that you are thinking with Eurus Illyderay. She's, you know, my favorite, absolutely favorite of mine. And but, but I think in your thinking as it appears in in the book, I can find that you know it is your book. So, you know it's Timothy Morton in there, but I think of bringing something else to object oriented ontology. Something that seems to me is more, there's a better job in the dislodging of the subject of the transparent I you know the thinking subject. And, and, and it, of course it has to do with your, you know, you, the moving with feminist thinking, non European, you know, Sub-Saharan African philosophy and the non binary approach that you that you highlight. So, yes, I'd like to, you know, I'd like to hear more about this non binary thinking. And that you call fluid and liquid. Can you can share with us. Oh, for real, I would be honoured to do that and it's a delight that you're reading this book, which is, which is my excuse to talk about not only Star Wars, which I saw the premiere in London in 1977, but also unfortunately into a greater extent more weirdly than the Muppet show, which I think of as a kind of strangely post human thing, and that the rainbow connection, the song, if I had my way that will be our planetary anthem, when we get to an age of greater ecological justice for everybody. And that actually the rainbow is really hyperspace and that hyperspace is you were saying about how things are happening now and we should, we should actually work on the now. And that this beautiful concept I feel in Afrofuturist art that hyperspace is sort of everywhere, right, and the, and the idea is just how to find it, you know, sort of it's it's under this computer here and sort of behind the screen you just have to feel figure out how to locate it then you can zoom, because truly actually linear time. The notion of being in a box is really just a tool. Right, like, you know, you're in your some kind of European colonialist person from 16 something and you want to voyage around the Cape of Good Hope to get to the so called spice island so you can invent perspective geometry to do it and you're going to invent a certain time scale having to do with stock trading to fund it. And that's just a tool and you can sort of scale this notion of time to any size you want depending on the task that you want to accomplish at the same time that there's a sense of other life forms usually. And you bring up this notion of a human life. Actually, I find it very moving. And I to am fascinated by the cosmic dimensions of all this. And it's something I love in what you, the way you think and the fact that you know, in a funny way, if, if, if the universe truly was mechanical if if if, as you say, historical event happens here, and then it, and then another one on a wikipedia line, if it was true then in a way life could never actually happen because to some extent life is a quantum theoretical thing it slightly reversing entropy and if time was always going in a line like this there would be no life forms so in a funny way it's like life itself is saying something true about the structure of the universe which is that it is a non-mechanical and that in fact the notion of life is not a biological concept actually nor indeed a juridical concept of life but is in fact this kind of oscillating vibrating trembling quality which I find extremely attractive about the quantum theory that is basically saying that fundamentally things are more like what we think of as liquids than they are solids and that actually the world is not made up of little cog wheels that are kind of manipulating each other that in fact it's much more like fluids and you bring up Lucia Riggari I have I read everything she wrote along with Julia Christopher before I went to Oxford University and of all the things that I studied in my literary theory class it was those people who at that point were called French feminists but I would prefer to just to think of them as French philosophers who happened to be writing in the late 1960s there was a deep profound influence on me and this idea that to be a thing is to be more like a liquid than a solid that it has no way to completely grasp or appropriate a thing which doesn't mean that this thing continues underneath the appearances no matter what which I take actually to be a profoundly violent concept that actually what it means is that things are fragile and finite but they are also profoundly opaque if we want to use a word that I find very attractive in the work of glissant you know that this notion of opacity that you can never actually appropriate with thinking or with eating or with making a picture of or as using an example of in a conversation with Denise a thing a thing with that thing be a spoon or a galaxy or an idea and that really time is kind of like a liquid that kind of like sprays out of things I happen to be in the orangery in in in Paris two weeks ago and I was looking at the amazing Monet paintings there and they were in a sort of oval right and they kind of surround you so you cannot see them all at once directly and they have the same dimension strangely enough as as the high quality space slit scan tech that produced that effect in the in the movies. The fascinating thing for me is that this image is actually from African philosophy I don't know whether George Lucas directly appropriated it but this concept of Colunga in the Congo philosophy is a concept of a liquid that is between worlds and it is is like a blue liquid in color like the inside of a spiraling shell and it is exactly it's it's it's not the 2001 hyperspace which I think it's basically Versailles it's it's it's not this kind of militarized hyperspace it's actually a kind of the utopian quality of of a time without work of a sort of unworking time where you can relax and be quiet and there's a little kind of fruitfulness in that. So I'm very, I'm very glad that you brought up this this image. Yeah, I, I love them, you know that you recalled, you know this, I called it an image of existence right the recall the image that this elementary mental things, the particles, they're actually they are vibrating right and they are vibrating at every all the time. Right. And, and because they're vibrating as they're vibrating, they're also, you know, exchanging transferring energy with with each other right transferring energy in the in the form of of what they call it phonons right the quasi particles used for measuring it. But we can also think of it in terms of infrared radiation and and heat, heat in general. And I, and I like it because this is, you know, one of the ways in which I've been, you know, approaching thinking about global warming. Thinking in terms of the access, right. Everything is oscillating all the time. Which heat is happening right to transfer of internal kinetic energy is taking place all the time anything that exists does it right the only moment. The only condition under which heat is not happening is absolute zero temperature, which is something they approach in the labs outside of the labs doesn't as far as anyone knows. It doesn't, it doesn't exist. And to me, you know, like following these, I mean, following the line of thinking beyond linear time beyond, you know, make mechanical, the mechanical order of nature right that description you're mentioning. One one could, you know, at this moment right now, just also, you know, take appropriate take and and and I don't even know exactly what what the verb is, but maybe exist with that that image of of heat, you know, of heating taking place, which means basically that also that one thing to transform. I think transforms and transfers and or transduce into another you know pieces of ice like circulating at all this time. And as I was saying before, I've been using this image to think about global warming and colonial subjugation at the same time. In the sense that, you know, well the accumulation of green, you know, greenhouse gases caused by primarily the fuel that's being extracted in former colonial spaces, but with that, but that can be extracted precisely because of the operation of mechanisms of total violence that are very much colonial right. The excess, you know, of those of those greenhouse gases is also the excess of violence, the of the violence that is deployed that has been deployed in order to extract these these fuel. And and then, you know, but obviously for thinking at, you know, with that kind of materiality requires that that shift right requires the shift from here to to then and from there to here and here to now right it really thinking of things oscillating is I find is a way of thinking about movement is movement without dislocation right so it's movement without space and time. It is a movement that is inherent to nature which in a way completely displaces the context of the subject of the transparent subject of the bind and then of binary thinking in you know as we have lived with lived with. So beautiful Denise like the some philosophy wants to get rid of movement or sort of explain it away. But for me and you it seems as if movement, which isn't about going from a to be in fact, but is something much more intrinsic to the structure of how things actually are is a very precious thing. And one of the things that I find very beautiful actually about the quantum theory is that there is no transparent energy, as it were there's red energy and there's purple energy and there's green energy and there's blue energy. But there is no such thing as unmarked transparent energy in this I find to be an extremely friendly, you know, I mean a lot of people who talk about quantum theory make it sound so kind of sort of intense, you know, and it is but I think it's a very kind and friendly idea that there is no such thing as a kind of underneath energy that is totally transparent and it's sort of underneath everything, you know. That is always something that is always that thing. That's something that which is material right. So I like to think of this movement as a is a constant constant really composition. A movement of matter right material thing. They just really compose, you know, really compose at all all the time. And how to think a world that is beyond the efficiency right how and how to think in a way that is maybe bigger is the wrong word but more agile and how to kind of get out from under the machinery that is not just in the material world but is in the right and present something like a utopian way of thinking that could enable people to slip out from under. I feel like efficiency in a way is is when when when you say excess I'm thinking might when I say efficiency that the efficiency metric of a kind of algorithm called capitalism that is munching down the bias there with greater and greater accuracy and how it might be good to get out from underneath it but I'm talking of getting out from underneath things. It might be time for me to say gareth Evans the wonderful director of this told me to say a safe word and this word is safe word I couldn't think of another safe word. And gareth is going to appear when he's going to moderate questions, which is marvelous. Thank you so much first of all for laying out this incredible landscape of creative imaginative and intellectual possibility and I'm now just going to really just try and tease forward on behalf of our wonderful audience some of the thoughts they've had while they'd be listening to you. And we've had some wonderful questions coming in thoughts responses. Many thanks indeed Sarah for navigating this while behalf through the BLs platform now we're going to go straight into this if we may and I mean I think really please do take this. Either of you both of you in whichever way you see fit of whoever would like to lead on these things some of these questions very much for both of you and others perhaps with a slightly more singular focus. But if I can, I could just take forward some of the thinkers that you've been engaging with in your conversation and the first question came in post structurally stored can make anything seem possible. I'm thinking here says the questioner of delays and guitar in the body without organs as an example, and the inherent risk to identity that comes with such physical and psychological openness. Is this a concern of yours when thinking about possible radical futures, and how do you reconcile these two positions, the idea that anything might be possible, and the risk to identity that comes with such openness. I'd love to hear from both of you perhaps on on your thoughts on that. Okay. Thank you, Gareth, for moderating this, this part of the, the conversation. Isn't it. It feels a bit scary to think at the same time that it is possible to think in such a way as to not not rely on any, any given solid cold and cold solid form basis. But then we should also remember that the very notion of identity, the very notion that that is one that different things, including the human humans are to be identified in one possible way in that that one single form through that one single form be that a category, or, or, or something else or the place of residence to make it simple to me is also. It's, it's has to be taken into account, right. So, so it's, let me say it's not a matter of choice. I think it's a matter of movement and the matter of a matter of itinerary, and it is always an itinerary that is guided by a certain intention in my, in my, in my case, for the most part. My thinking my itinerary is guided by this concern with global, the impossibility of global justice, the impossibility of social justice with the operations of the societal patriarchal matrix and the violence that it terrorizes and that it, it deploys in order to map and confront these violences. There are post structuralist strategies have been helpful towards undermining precisely of towards exposing precisely, precisely the pretense of not having a solid ground of being transparent and, and towards and this move towards justice is also a way of perhaps safeguarding what, you know, you who is asking the question maybe thinking about identity, right in the in the ways but not not in the ways in which identity is presented or is supported or has been constructed by the tools of modern knowledge that is post structuralist usually, usually attack. So, I think, I think I'm saying something that is that takes both both of those moments that you see contradictory into account, but place them in a larger context, which is the one that I'm defining here with global justice, whatever it means. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Tim. I'd love to hear. Add to that. Thank you, Denise. I mean, another word, another one word for anything could happen is creativity. You know, and I feel like a world that is more attuned to, you know, being kind and and all that to more life forms, including human ones is going to feel to us. It's like failures and starting and stopping and getting it wrong and realizing that you can't get it completely right. In particular, I'm struck by what Denise is saying about the about about the way. When you stress test this notion of justice, it really does break down. I mean, in my sense, it's based on a notion of property. If nothing can be property, then then we can't have any justice in a certain way. So we need another way of thinking, but to us, you know, who are very addicted to creativity to efficiency. Thanks very much. Exxon and Chevron who work, you know, a couple of miles that way where I'm pointing the any kind of different world will seem like it's failing a lot. So that is is is creative. I'm very struck by how you're thinking, obviously, as you would both do, of course, with such insight about language, and perhaps we could literally take on from what you've both just said and think about the coded alternative realities and possibilities inside language. I'm thinking here of etymology, of course, and how often the original desire, the intention to bring an idea into language has been so eroded altered corrupted and redirected, you know, by other pressures over time over centuries, of course. I wonder whether you think that inside language itself is a possibility for, you know, a radical reinvention of our social reality, because we need new words. Clearly some words have been emptied out of all meaning. But is there a way that we can use language itself to, to, to become an active agent in the world, not just a carrier and conveyor of meaning of course language can be very destructive, but also something that can can actually realise a new reality in the world. Kim. I'm super positive about this. I tend to be a little bit too polyanna, the way I like to think about things, but the only where the only place to find the so called future is in the so called past, aka all the stuff that you have around you. From a certain point of view, words are really just the past right and fascism, which is arising all around the world, very scarily as we speak, is really an attempt to find some kind of deep meaningfulness in the past where you will never find it in some fragment of some meme-like or tweed-like thing that never will contain anything like a meaning. And that is why, from a certain linguistic point of view, that fascism is extremely violent. There's no, there's no way to make something great again. It never was great in the first place. Maybe you can find something in the future. And to that extent, you know, meaning in a way is not only from the future, it sort of is the future. When I teach this to my undergrads, I always say something a little bit cute, like you never know how the sentence is going to end, banana sponge elephant parenthesis, period, dot dot dot. You know, the meaning and the words are actually overlapping. The meaning is not different from the words. And it's a problem with patriarchal logic that we have this idea that meaning is here and the words are here or false is here and true is here. But really science, which would also be, you know, non-religious world altogether, including the so-called Paleolithic world, to a certain extent, is all about how true and false are kind of overlap all the time. So that actually the future and the past kind of overlapping. And so I'm very, what's, I don't know what the right word is. But I feel like yes, of course it's our, it's our duty in fact to try to find, to try to find it in the language. For talking specifically, directly about meaning, right? Because it is the, that is the dangerous aspect of our thinking, whether you think of meaning coming out as form, in abstract ways, or in this more fascistically oriented Hegelian way as essence. And then language, if language, if we are thinking of language in terms of how, a mold of presentation of things or words or terms, then language becomes, I think, can and is important when, in the more moment of presentation and that particular mode of presentation, when it postpones and avoids essence or form, the imposition of essence or form, which means exactly the, the killing on the undermining of any possible creative other meaning that could be, could be arriving. So to me, yes, something like sign language, you know, may hold something like sign language itself or other kinds of language modes of expression that, you know, we would use the name language to for that. They hold something, but there is always something else that is before, and then in this, in our particular case given, you know, the organization orientation of post enlightenment thinking it is this essence and this form that always one of the things when I write, I'm always I don't try to find the perfect sentence, but I'm always aware of where I'm betraying myself, right, that word, that statement that carries so many meanings, and many of them totally against what I'm trying to do. And then I just tell myself I have to live with it, because there is no controlling of it, it's there, and it's there because, you know, because that form of that essence is already attributed that meaning is already given to that term and I have to live with it, you know. So that's the other side of the conversation now, so right I mean a little bit of, you know, acknowledgement of the limits. What you said to me has made me think about the notion of listening, you know that to me that sort of words are like the receipts in a way that come out of the. I don't know what the cash register of some kind of listening process and that acting is in fact not a kind of big bad, you know cutting into a continuum but is in fact made up of little tiny. If you were going to put an action around a particle accelerator, you might find that it was made up of little tiny quantized little energy wave packets of appreciating things and that actually attending to and and listening is how you act at least the times when I've been in a band. I've all been about how act when you're playing music with somebody means you're listening to them and you're listening to your musical lineage and you're listening to your instrument and that this this binary between doing a thing and attending to a thing. Also is part of this binary on the left between so called incrementalism which is coded as kind of feminine and like big bad proper revolutionary action by the right person who tends to be some kind of a white chromosome person. You know who just announces that they're the leader, and then maybe this difference isn't so great as we like to think and then maybe again it's it's not as impossible and that maybe people like me make it sound really difficult to do political change but maybe it's actually too easy in a funny way because it has to do with listening. Thank you both again we're sewing seeds here for future thought and conversation so many many ideas coming as I would expect of course out of your wonderful responses now we have some other great questions coming in from the audience many thanks indeed for these. Thinking about thinking which is what both of you have been doing in your conversation this evening. Could you talk a little bit about how imagination can be seen and can act critically as a way of thinking a dimension of thinking because for this particular audience member who was amazed by the conversation. The feeling the emotion the atmosphere and what you've been communicating suggests if you like you know imagination in action and I wonder how imagination plays off and in dialogue with thinking as a proposal forwards. Okay, I'll go. I will first. Thank you. Thank you for the question. Yeah, so one of the things I like to say and it's a joke but it's not a joke is that I'm very much interested in taking the imagination and separating it from the understanding and finally releasing it from the country and program. There's a lot to do with you know many many of the things that we are that we are talking about so yes the imagination has a lot to do with it with the thinking, and I think with. And it may when we attempt to you know to the things that we identify as you know coming out of the imagination, it can tell us of the limits of our thinking and I think science fiction is so much about that right how far we we can go. At the same time that is the possibility of of a bridge. As we move away from determination as we, you know, move away from the attempt at saying that something is that thing. That thing alone for this reason alone, you know, thinking in terms of thinking in terms of cosality or in some movement of determinacy. As we move away from from that then yes so the imagination as as that moment, you know thinking out of the imagination as that mental moment of bringing things together. It opens up to to other, you know, yes to other to other possibilities and something else I have been, you know, considering is precisely that right. The question is what what image of existence would you know break through a separate ability to determine the sea and you know, and the empire of time and allow for a mode of attending to what exists human and no human and more than human that it's not predicated on instrumentalization and not not geared towards efficiency and, you know, refining, etc. And that's so what I'm saying is that I think that moment is a moment that it is with thinking, but can be analytically distinguished from thinking as something that it's more on the creative side of things right. It all happens at the same time but we can, you know, present it as if you know that is a separation between the image, and then how we go about making sense. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Tim. Yeah, I'm delighted to talk to this and, you know, Denise said it, I mean, one thing to add, and I'm sure Denise would agree with this that the word imagine and words like visual eyes are obviously very ocular centric, you know, and we have this tradition in Western philosophy of this notion of the Ados, you know, a thing that you can see as in I see like we never say oh I smell to mean I understand or agree or whatever. And so sometimes I like to say centralization rather than visualization, but nevertheless that's a tiny little point but what I really want to say is New York City. When you, when you hear that phrase, you're there right you in whatever sense yeah visualizes a feeling, unquote, yeah, New York, New York, what a wonderful town it's a it's a you can feel it. You don't build it up from little pixels on a grid you don't okay so there's alphabet city and then there's first and second and then you don't you don't do that. It's sort of parachute in, politically, right. And this is a quality of what Denise is calling thinking that is actually terribly terribly important and has to do with again this that the possibility of the future, actually, completely limited to just kind of grinding our way through the desert of pre existing stuff stuff stuff that in a way that the concept of imagination is in a way, a certain way unalienated sentient being superpower. You know that a lot of, you know so patriarchal religion makes the imagination be part of I don't know some kind of invisible white guy with a beard in the sky who mostly wants to kill you most of the time, you know, and our ability to to visualize anything at all is under attack right now. And I would almost want to say, you know, just the sheer capacity to visualize is a very precious thing I'm a student of to Ben Buddhism. And visualization is very, very important for that. And it's not because you're picturing something but because you're actually feeling something and evoking something that it is in fact a kind of movement. And visualization has a kind of evanescent shimmery quality to it, you know which is actually terribly important. We tend to think that ideology is sort of everywhere and it is but that doesn't mean that it's everything, because just off the corner of your eye as it kind of shimmering mirage quality of things are really still moving. You know, in no matter what concepts are saying they are. And so I think imagination is speaking to that quality, you know which seems incredibly weak, maybe or fragile, but is in fact an amazingly powerful force, I feel, once we figure out how to how to tune to it. And thank you again, as always, we've got four more questions and obviously please feel free to to answer them each or both of you as you see fit. Thinking forward a little bit about this idea of how are thinking in acts itself in the world and also what you've just said to him about visualization. One of the ways we've obviously encountered the world visually and you know sensorily over the last 18 months or so is through screens and a question here about the medium itself of communication and exchange at this point. The medium, the media, in this case let's say zoom or a platform as we're on, insisting as it does on the singular the subject of the individual, constrain the capacity by definition for a larger, more polyrhythmic and fractal form of thinking as you've both discussed. If that's the case what can we do about this and how can we disrupt the very medium that allows us to communicate with each other, but at the same time of course insists on maintaining its own status quo. And shall I take this first in is any excuse to have a good old man about zoom. Right. I mean, here we all are in our little squares doing this kind of market show thing where we're all sort of waving to each other not that I dislike the market show at all. I think perhaps it's not so much about individualism as it is about the. Computational regularity, right, we've got this grid, you know what's wrong with Q and on, they present photographs of people winking and doing this. And because it's organized by a computer in a grid, people think oh that must mean something there's this minimum of meaningfulness. What is very cool about say teaching in a classroom which I just started to do again is actually that they in funny way please don't tell the Dean because I'll be fired. We put it this way, but face to face teaching has less information in it in zoom. Everything means something like there's a little chat box. There's a little square that's defines where I am and where Denise is and so on. And everything is kind of hyper significant. And it doesn't leave you any room in a way to do this visualization imagination that we were just talking about. That's the problem with it really that it is this kind of claustrophobia, because in a funny way, it's richer than non zoom space. You know, in on zoom space, there's all these things like that. The the fan rotating that you can't see there's the fact that I have a certain smell of the hairspray that I put on earlier. There's the strange kind of light that I put on the table from IKEA that looks really wrong when you were to actually look at it. And it doesn't. I mean, I'm not actually in this kind of pristine stage set really. And I think this would be something that Derrida would say right that sentences and phrases and ideas are always mediated in some way. And that, you know, knowing that about them is actually part of how to liberate oneself from the oppressiveness of them. Now, I don't know if I can outline a program for exactly how to change zoom. In particular, right this minute, but I think what it is is is to do with an excess of this sort of claustrophobic information now to to kind of phrase. Yes, I don't have much to add, but just highlighting the images. The two things with social media. It is immediately everything is very, very, very present as your symptom. And then I just say also the fact that it is an immediate interpolation at the level of affect right it is about liking right it is about it is. It is almost empty it's not empty that little thing that has no meaning carries a lot of affect how many people liked what I posted on Instagram. And that's something we have to attend to, but it is, but I think it is it will be. How do I say that, like, I think like everything else that will be many ways through which we will just, you know, design modes of separating effectively. And this I think is very difficult, but it's not impossible that you can use something that appeals to you to so immediately the love at the level of affect. And then and at the same time to keep some like okay the thing is doing it to me I don't know how exactly will do it but the recent, the recent conversation and and things happening with the Facebook indicates that you know, folks are taking action some ways. This concept of immediacy that is perhaps the most oppressive right it's like whoever has the right reaction the fastest is the winner. Yeah, therefore the person with the most leisure time is the winner. Therefore the most privileged person is the winner in the Facebook environment it just maintains the status quo only sort of automate, you know. And so absolutely to that like that try how to introduce some kind of hesitancy actually that will be much more productive than knowing immediately what to think and feel. Thank you both. Again, I mean very important to follow on that idea, if you like about time Tim and the privilege that a certain kind of class position allows in relation to time. This long player is a framework for this conversation we're of course both aware of its quality in a linear sense it moves forward for 1000 years but it's also very much just a project of circularity it repeats after 1000 years and during its own generative development elements within it are moving alongside each other in a circular frame Given the importance of time Denise you mentioned earlier how important is to be able to find ways to act now as opposed to delaying a kind of action into a proposed sort of utopian future to use my my own words here. How do we think about this relationship in time between the experience of a linearity and yet knowing there are larger forms that are moving around us quite literally. And where we place our kind of our own pressure points of action and response and creative possibilities, as you've talked about so well. I would say and then I think my answer is going to be very, you know, short and not in a bad sense but in a good sense. Now, right. I keep thinking when we were talking about the imagination I was thinking about Benjamin and in the dialectical image that now that now that I have in mind it's not that now in a sequence in time. But it is a now in the configuration in which of which the time that that duration right the time that passes, even if it is the 1000 year time of long player is it's there but it's not determining is not the privileged way of, of making sense of, of this now. So, so long player is going to be playing without, you know, like a little less than 1000 years from now, but every time it's playing it's playing now, and in 200 years, as it is playing nobody will know what played today. Right. And we can't anticipate what will be playing later. So here now this moment, but this moment opening up to the cosmic and opening in up to the project and everything else right me in this in this now. It is not about totally completely also. But it is, it is more about putting time in its place. As somebody who practices meditation I'm going to say that very hesitantly because actually I'm very, very lazy and bad at doing it. There is the in the corporate world right now the concept of mindfulness, which very much has to do with the kind of the kind of time that Denise is arguing against. That one fixates actually on a certain concept of time, and then uses that to kind of replace other thoughts a little bit like the occupied sign in the toilet on the plane you sort of replace all the other thoughts with this being in the present. It's not the kind of now I feel that we're talking about here and the, the word I would use is nowness might actually be quite like a word that Benjamin uses for this notion of now. Insofar as it is a quality. It has a texture to it it's not just so some kind of abstract point on a line. It's that there is a movement inside of it intrinsically it is not a static dot, but actually there is a feeling when you're when when nowness is happening or you're letting nowness be part of your experience experience that things are kind of constantly evaporating. Right, that there is not this kind of solid identity that actually like a sort of piece of dry ice that your, your thoughts and your feelings and all your, your physical being is sort of evaporating all the time. And this is a very useful powerful thing. And it is not this corporate concept, I think, of a kind of fetishisation of a certain kind of clock time. And of course the corporate world latched on to mindfulness, which is really just a tool that enables you to, you know, realise that something more important which is a kind of something one might call awareness, rather than mindfulness, I think. Thank you so much to our audience first of all for wonderful questions. There's much more we could have spoken about. And of course these are just prompts really for further conversation. And many, many ways that we can take these conversations forward before I do round up proceedings here in the very much in the, in the now moment of our experience. I'd just like to remind you, of course, of many further events at the British Library, not least tomorrow, in collaboration with Invisible Dust, a day long event Living Nature, Art Science and Indigenous Knowledge, which undoubtedly will take on some of these thoughts in their own ways that we've been sharing and experiencing tonight. Please do find that of course in the ways that you know how it's free to attend with everything available online. A long player has a very particular project unfolding right now available to visit in London, if you are in London to the 21st of November, Sonic Ray turns sound into light and back into sound in the very real environment of the London doctrines. Please do find details of that on the Art Angel website. And if you would like to support long player into its remaining 978 years of first time playing. Then please do visit longplayer.org where you can find every aspect of long players project detailed for you, including the buying time supporting of long player by hosting a day in the calendar year of your choice. There's much more we could say. There's much more we could say about our wonderful guest, but please do find that books in all the ways you know how it's been a real pleasure to be a small part of this wonderful conversation. I'd like to thank Rebecca and her team behind the scenes that you meet media, John Fawcett and his team at the British Library, everyone at Art Angel and the Long Player Trust, especially Sarah, Mike and Ella. But please wherever you are, raise your glasses, raise your hands, cheer out loudly and possibly break as Emma Goldman always advised into a form of dance, a dance of course being a form of your own choice, whatever dance you might like to do so. I'd like to thank for their wonderful insights, their presence with us today and their ongoing incredible activity in the world. Denise Farera de Silva and Timothy Morton. Thank you very much indeed, and good night. Thank you. Thank you.