“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, February 15, 2011

Behold the Non-Cat


From these proofs on evolution that I'm editing:

There is no neutral, static background against which specific life-forms could become meaningful. Evolution means that this furry four-legged being that purrs is not strictly a cat . . . In a Darwinian world we can see around the edges of life-forms, and into their strange ambiguous depths—these shadowy hidden sides undermine the coherence of what we took to be our immediate, commonsense perception.


See? OOO rearing its ugly head a few months before I realized I was “one of them.” It also means that evolution is a hyperobject, as I've recently been arguing in some talks.

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