“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


Saturday, November 3, 2012

Sherryl Vint 3: The Mise-en-Scene of Things to Come (Underground Ecocriticism Keynote 2)

Laura Keller, NB. About breeding rules. Denial of chance to reproduce. Heteronormative fecundity.
A brief sequence challenges this. Greed underlying drive to have children.

Seed. Dystopian narrative, echoing 1984. Terminator seeds. Bad and good seed distinguished by tech. Both strains grow equally well, so the point is profit is unnecessary. Scarcity << techno legal regime. It's this context of ownership that is the problem, not the seed. Eco-moralism.

Plastic Bag. Very innovative use of sentient nonhuman. (This is Sherryl's gesture to OOO.) All the Angst of Frankenstein's creature. Loneliness of longevity. Jellyfish and bags dancing. It's definitely a kind of eco gothic.

The 6th World. Challenges our typical thinking about sci fi and colonialism, nature and technoculture. Refusal of real science versus indigenous knowledge. Active Navaho space program, mission to Mars. Company seed develops a fungus but traditional corn saves the mission. No sense however of the native being different from technoscience. But instead these things can be in productive dialogue.

Tools and methods can damage and commodify, or open up another future.

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