Timothy Morton

The ecological crisis we are facing is also a crisis of our sense of what things are. Not only are we witnessing colossal, disturbing change to parts of our world that we treated for too long as a static, neutral background; but also we are seeing how one person’s change for the worse is another person’s benefit (Arctic Russians and Norwegians looking forward to sunbathing, perhaps). And much, much more than this, we are seeing how the scale of human change is only one scale among a bewildering variety of them. Geological time is about how rocks change – they don’t just sit there reliably. All these profound shifts are changing our very ideas about what change itself could be – whether political, artistic, psychological or physical. Change itself is changing. How do we cope in a world where not only are our physical environments melting, but also our ideas about what those environments are?

Related to Kosmopolis 2017, Kosmopolis, Kosmopolis 2017

22 March 2017