“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


Friday, August 22, 2014

Victorian Socialist Goth OOO

Yes. This should put paid to the silly idea that OOO is about being a bourgeois pig or whatever. I'm an anarchist pig anyway (!) but this wonderful book about Ruskin and Morris and gothic should convince you. What Lars Spuybroek says about the procedural rhetoric of gothic, the way it refuses a substance/accidents binary, and the way it leans towards the socialist thoughts of those two guys should do the trick.

Morris is condemned in some purist Marxist circles for being kitsch. Awesome! Bring on the kitsch!

Just look at what Ruskin says in a book called (wow) The Ethics of the Dust:

Things are not either alive, or wholly dead.

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