“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, October 19, 2012

Final Statements: Biopolitics Liveblog 8

Do we have closing statements?

Tim: Pleasure as closure, destruction, death. Ecological awareness is aperture. This is the beginning of human history.

Kim: Crisis needs to be named: vulnerability. Those who are most vulnerable are indeed in crisis. There is a place for a language of crisis.

Becky: Crisis narratives can be tied into social control. What crisis talk misses is the long term violence.

Sara: This was our conversation about regulation. Confusion of whether or not to regulate. And for whom. 

Kim: To be mindful is to be mindful. Time matters. To inflect our thought with time is necessary.

Q: To limit uncertainty we confuse the chronic and the acute.

Joshua: I want to take Kim's side. Freaking out about acting too hastily is the academy and corporate headquarters. They will do anything to defer action. Is there a good or a bad version of not being hasty? I'm not sure that's a true account of the world. There is probably a deficiency of willingness to act. EarthFirst! and ELF are good.

Juliana: I'm slightly bewildered! Many things confuse me. Many big terms. The interesting thing about ecological stuff, there is a clarity. It is an issue, a problem. The more it gets muddy, the more I feel weird about it. I don't know what to say other than that. It will be tough. EarthFirst! and ELF have been hugely powerful.

Q: Back to pleasure.

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