“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, April 30, 2013

Object-Oriented Ontology and Ideology


David Wiesner rewrote The Three Little Pigs. In this version, the pigs escape from the book by somehow exiting the page. They find themselves in a curious interstitial space populated with other characters. They bring a dragon back to their world and defeat the wolf. What can we learn from this about our ideological and ecological situation? One is that when we exit from our ideological “world” with its familiar contours, we are still somewhere. Isn’t this the lesson of those interstitial moments in David Lynch movies, in which we see a transition between seemingly coherent worlds? These transitional spaces are not just a void. Maybe philosophy and ideology only thinks these spaces as voids from within a certain kind of philosophical or ideological framework. OOO and Buddhism share something very interesting. They both hold that the interstitial space between things is not a blank void. In fact, it’s charged with meaning, even with causality.
--Realist Magic 

1 comment:

Jk Bird said...

Here, Quantum Mechanics could be seen as an ideology upgrade (or maybe downgrade, resulting in humility, getting closer to the earth). Even in quantum vacuums, there is quantum fluctuation, virtual particles popping in and out of existence.