“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, January 20, 2012

Withdrawal, What the Heck Is It?

I just wrote this to an inquirer:

“Object” is a tough word and it does bring up this ideologeme of nasty grey porridge, but we OOO-ers are struggling against that. I like to think that withdrawal means total uniqueness. Things withdraw from access, remember, which doesn't mean that they become vague haphazard blobs of whateverness. Withdrawal means “unspeakable,” because unique. Withdraw doesn't mean lose definition, but be so definite that all modes of access fail in some sense.

I should note that this inquirer had some experience of Zen—this does seem to help to understand the physicality of OOO, rather than abstract training in “Buddhist philosophy” (sic).

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