ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Atavism and Prepperism

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Atavism and Prepperism

This piece on preppers is interesting, and I've seen the National Geographic show a few times.

I remember being on retreat in Crestone next door to some preppers who started talking quite "innocently" (at least innocently enough) to their lodger about how to shoot a bear. 30 minutes later it was what part of the black man's head to aim for when the looters come from the big city after civilization collapses...

I have a theory. Prepping is only consciously oriented to an apocalyptic future. In reality, it is an atavistic reaction to a world that has already ended (Anthropocene, hyperobjects--and let's not forget, America ceasing to be a frontier pioneer white settlers against everyone else in a circle). It's a reaction to an apocalypse that has already occurred.

Discuss.

1 comment:

Unknown said...: Yes! Also like the childhood game of "what I would do if I were in a car accident/ being tortured for information/ lost my eyesight...etc. We all want superpowers. It's funny though because a co-worker of mine is so country that he feels ready without prepping. I'm thinking I should tell him everything I know; December 26, 2012 at 9:50 PM

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

“Outstanding.”
—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”
—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”
—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”
—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”
—Vince Carducci

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Atavism and Prepperism

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