“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, June 3, 2011

The Four Ages of Art: A Note on Hegel


...just to reiterate, I'm not saying that nonhumans only make contact with humans in the fourth age. Clearly they've been in touch with humans in indigenous Australia, for instance, for millennia.

I'm saying that from within white Western modernity, announcing its end, nonhumans break through the cultural, political, epistemological and ontological barriers erected to keep them out, somewhere during the Anthropocene (1945+).

1 comment:

Leif said...

John Lilly's experiments with dolphins in the 50's and 60's are especially fascinating. He was a strict materialist, operating on the brains of live dolphins until, well, he took acid and then established some fascinating research labs in which communication was sought between dolphin and human. He also envisioned a swim-in lab, in which dolphins could come to interact with humans