“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, June 4, 2013

OOO and Abjection

Someone asked me about this on Twitter. Then I found this paragraph from Hyperobjects:

A baby vomits curdled milk. She learns to distinguish between the vomit and the not-vomit, and comes to know the not-vomit as self. Every subject is formed at the expense of some viscous, slightly poisoned substance, possibly teeming with bacteria, rank with stomach acid. The parent scoops up the mucky milk in a tissue and flushes the wadded package down the toilet. Now we know where it goes. For some time we may have thought that the U-bend in the toilet was a convenient curvature of ontological space that took whatever we flush down it into a totally different dimension called Away, leaving things clean over here. Now we know better: instead of the mythical land Away, we know the waste goes to the Pacific Ocean or the wastewater treatment facility. Knowledge of the hyperobject Earth, and of the hyperobject biosphere, presents us with viscous surfaces from which nothing can be forcibly peeled. There is no Away on this surface, no here and no there. In effect, the entire Earth is a wadded tissue of vomited milk.

4 comments:

cgerrish said...

The idea of the "away" seems related to the concept of negative externalities in economics."If a good has a negative externality, then the cost to society is greater than the cost consumer is paying for it." There is no "externality".

Jason Chaplin said...

Old news, Morton. “[A wadded tissue of vomited milk] anywhere is a threat to [non-wadded-tissue-of-vomited-milks] everywhere.” — MLK

‘[T]he entire Earth is a wadded tissue of vomited milk’ and capitalism is the ‘Congo, a country in disarray, with thousands of drugged child-warriors.’

Žižek: ‘the Hegelian totality IS the very space of the interaction between the (“abstract”) Whole and the details that elude its grasp, although they are generated by it.’

Makes me think of all that faeces covered space junk… Canned Heat - Poor Moon.

Jason Chaplin said...

Old news, Morton. “[A wadded tissue of vomited milk] anywhere is a threat to [non-wadded-tissue-of-vomited-milks] everywhere.” — MLK

‘[T]he entire Earth is a wadded tissue of vomited milk’ and capitalism is the ‘Congo, a country in disarray, with thousands of drugged child-warriors.’

Žižek: ‘the Hegelian totality IS the very space of the interaction between the (“abstract”) Whole and the details that elude its grasp, although they are generated by it.’

Makes me think of all that faeces covered space junk… Canned Heat - Poor Moon!

Anonymous said...

As Benji sniffed and gingerly devoured the fetid mass, I understood how to taste one's own vomit and forensically ascertain the offending sources of one's discomfort.