“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


Thursday, November 29, 2012

Out-Humed: Object-Oriented Politics

I think I just heard a mother of a talk. (Read the liveblog I just posted in parts.)

Ecuador used modernity--Humean (statistical) causality and the Kantian phenomenon-thing gap--to outfox the Humean corporations.

Ecuador determined that indeterminacy was grounds for precaution. The very uncertainty of statistical causality is used to promote the social good, which by default includes nonhuman lifeforms, since large hydrocarbons affect all life.

That is dope. It is using uncertainty and modernity against the "no one can prove" denialists.

The gap between the phenomena of hydrocarbons--mostly because of the lack of research on them!--and their reality as things was exploited.

Now that is an object oriented politics. Any questions?

PS: the relationists were Texaco-Chevron and their breakdown of the molecules into "fractions" with thousands of different forms of toxicity. Ecuador regarded them all as a UNIT.

No comments: