Timothy Morton explains his title by reading the passage where it appears in John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture, linking Ruskin’s idea of the meaning of a building coming from its age to the speculative realist view that sees time as a feature pouring out of buildings. He discusses themes relating to his upcoming book, Humankind. He contrasts Object Oriented Ontology’s approach to matter with Aristotle and Kant. Morton discusses Marx’s distinction between exchange value and use value as fatally flawed with idealism, until corrected by opening the discussion up to other beings. Likewise, Marx’s concept of alienation—and Louis Althusser’s reformulation of it—is refined when opening up to more access modes. Morton returns to Ruskin, discussing the Pre-Raphaelites, and Ruskin’s view of the importance of the builder’s labor and the patina of spans of human use. Morton responds to questions and comments from the audience regarding the inaccessibility of buildings, accepting ambiguity in the context of “fake news”, withdrawl, memory, and metaphor.
