“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Knowledge Ecology: OOO and Ecology

De Chirico knew a thing or two about the strangeness of cities

HT Graham Harman. This is a great post that I shall delve into some more. Adam cites what I say about cities in my talk at Temple.

He begins to push OOO withdrawal towards the ecology discussion, which I'm very happy about. This is the difficult part, because it's counter-intuitive that withdrawal can be of service to ecological thinking.

I firmly believe that it can, precisely because it prevents reductionism and holism (two targets of this post as well). And also because it opens objects to nonhumans so decisively.

Let me just quote his cities part, because the way Adam puts it is very attractive to me:

the city-as-hyperobject, withdraws from our relations to it. There are plenty of subjective relations to a city. There is a city-for-me, a city-for-you, a city-for-the-subway-system, but the complete fullness of the city-in-itself withdraws from these relations, it always emerges in new constellations of activity.

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