“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, May 20, 2011

Materials: Objects: Environments Liveblog 6 (Stephen Muecke)

part of a dreaming from Central Australia
my nervous system has been kidnapped by Aboriginal Australians
part of an indigenous poetics: no one seeing the system steadily and seeing it whole
experiments in thinking with things

David Uniapon: “everything that exists has some life apart from itself” (well put), indigenous Australian philosopher
me on the excessive object
some people need porn to get off
we don’t have a terminology of love for our sacred rituals

bandicoots, gurra
Karora: thinking, desire
flashes that caused the bandicoots to emerge
broke through the crust of the Earth
filled with sweet dark juice of the honeysuckle
he cooks and eats some bandicoots
and then talking about the painting:
it flashes in your mind and urges you to move around a bit

Harman: bring back myth; Sloterdijk, not just western--enlightenment should have something to do with enlightening the mood

scholars still sending out the term “modern”

Harman: quasi- term of objects undermines the idea of nature

ancient-modern paintings are hyperobjects

Bergson: it’s repugnant to us that we might have to create a new way of thinking to account for a new object

Latour: against the materialist orthodoxy tends to treat things as if they’re inanimate all the time

animist attitude that risks sounding new agish

singing, dancing, writing are not communicate items but ecological events existing more spatially than temporally
spirits, dreams, fictional beings

how can you imagine the relation between a snail and the leaf it’s eating

water spirit as the most changeful spirit of all

Question: absence of subject–object in the Dreaming
what does it mean to occupy a world in which landscape is a sentient being?

1 comment:

tom said...

Anything that is has a life apart from it, David Unaipan

Living and non-living beings become the media in which other beings exist, Timothy Morton


-Deconstruction and the Ecological Thought?

The hypothesis that deconstruction has a capacity for contemplating ambience, the withdrawn, the vast and disturbingly decentered, and the ecological dissolution of the subject (whose attitude is one of distance to the world) is reasonable and empirically demonstrated in critical applications that articulate how meaning takes place within a structure that has strange properties independent of conscious intention. This view (flexible and robust in its handling of paradox and contradiction) insists on the presence of a withdrawn object outside the signifying system [--> climate change]. Is it possible to relate the deconstructionist 'withdrawn' to that of the point of view of the transduced (within OOO) where the conversion of energy via the transducer (acting on information within the aesthetic realm) is ignored/ withdrawn? Is this a structuralist-intentional-misprision on reality? Moreover, is there an analogy or greater degree of concord between deconstruction and the shift in ecological thought that reads all organisms as being made from pieces of other creatures, a palimpsest of mutations (difference) within a mesh of adaptations that is neither a syntactically well organized unified work nor linear by nature?

If there is some truth to this, how do we clarify it - most simply - for literary critics? Futhermore, how do we take the clarififcation of this to the question of climate change? Or better, perhaps, how does the confluence or agreement between deconstruction and the ecological show how post-structuralist thought can assist our understanding of the following ecological (hyper-object based) concepts: (i) that materiality is a set of formal relationships; (ii) locality is an abstraction; (iii) process is simply an object; (iv) irony offers greater eco-awareness (gapsploitation) than a mind attuned to interconnectedness; (v) a totalising context is something for epistemologists, while hermeneuts prefer to be fragile?????

Thanks again for such an inspiring presentation and thoughtfully open series of responses to questions throughout the day.