“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


Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Hyperobjects on Presentism

"Please don't think that this is Luddite primitivism. It is only an observation based on some quite graphic experiences of different kinds of temporality. It is difficult to believe, naturally, when one is immersed in a vast ocean of presentist metaphysics inscribed into every device about one's person. In fact, my solution to presentism is not a quasi-Buddhist “living in the now” popular with forms of Nature mysticism. Nonhuman sentient beings, for instance, are admired (or pitied) for living in this “now.” In admiring (or pitying) them thus, we only see them as instruments of our technological era, extensions of the ticking clocks of metaphysical presence. This is not a progressive ecological strategy. Like Nature, like Matter, the Present has not served ecology well."

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