“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, February 25, 2011

Rutgers Eco Conference: Ed Cohen response to my talk

MP3 of mine to follow soon. Here are Ed's comments. He was somewhat hostile, so it was a little hard to keep up with everything, but I managed to put most of his comments down in telegraph form.

Ed Cohen, Women's Studies, Rutgers


He's a member of Social Text collective
Latour: ecology as reasoning of how we live together
Meditation as well as healing
Hyper ness is a problem: I'm too fast, too hyper
Nietzsche's notion of rumination
Having to be a cow and not a modern person
Things take time
Stengers: cosmic idiot
Demanding that we slow down

Who are “we”? Cohen doesn't feel interpellated by the "we" in my talk
What about nonhumans? Or nonwesterners? I've read his blog and he never talks about them. (?)

Aboriginals protesting natural gas production vs. Morton on hyperobjects.
Songlines: what would hyperobjects mean to them? (They wouldn't care! Is his answer)
Multinaturalism as opposed to my “without-nature” (Latour)
I'm not taking account of nonwestern non-science, and I am taking account of Western science, therefore I am very bad.
Cohen has many issues with OOO, the most significant being, “So what? Don't we already know that about Heidegger? We don't need Graham Harman to tell us.”
Dalai Lama: the western opposition of subject and object has been greatly exaggerated

4 comments:

Andy said...

Nice to meet and hear you, Tim. I'm looking forward to the mp3 of your talk.

Best, Andy Parker (acparker@amherst.edu)

Scu said...

Is Cohen saying he has read your blog, and you never talk about nonhumans or nonwesterners? Or does he have a blog?

Sorry, I am having trouble following.

Timothy Morton said...

I was very glad to meet you too Andy!

Scu, yeah, I think Ed was saying that he had read my blog and that I never say anything about nonhumans, or indigenous people. At least that's what I remember. MP3 soon so we can check.

Scu said...

I will check out the MP3 at some point. This is odd, because you talk about nonhumans a lot. I liked his book, A Body Worth Defending, a lot. Weird.