“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


Friday, December 24, 2010

The Ridicule Phase

So new ideas tend to get ignored, then ridiculed, then violently opposed, then everyone says “I always said that myself.” It's likely that these phases are simultaneous, with a greater majority trending towards one or the other.

OOO seems to be at the ridicule phase right now among some of Graham's and Levi's readers. I'm honored to be included in their company. I take all that as a huge compliment, actually. Graham has some very nice posts up that include some words about me, which I endorse wholly—I'm a wearer of my heart on my sleeve.

Actually once when I was very short of money I was trained as a double glazing salesman. I never made it past day one, because the trainer said “You're just too honest for this mate.”

I've been through this all before when I was a food studies guy. Writing about vegetarianism, it was assumed you were a nutter (as well as a nut-eater, which I was and may well be again). Then when food studies became legit, it was as if no battles had ever been fought over it. Now Levi and I can write about food and I feel like I'm pushing the envelope again. But for a while there, it was so corny (oh no, this is what happens when you write about food) that I avoided it.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

One thing I've found interesting in Graham Harman's work is that he isn't afraind to spawn new vocabularies, to experiment with a perspectival ploy in his arguements. It's as if he is truncating the whole arsenal of figuration out of the oldest forms of rhetoric to deploy a revisonary philosophy of objects in such a way that both Analyticals and Continentals could, if they only would, begin to see what he sees....

I've only begun to wander around your site, but I like your take on hyper-objects. I'll do some study and write a review sometime this month.

Timothy Morton said...

I agree profoundly with that first para. Thanks for looking!