“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


Wednesday, July 22, 2015

My New Idea

A new idea a day keeps the doctor away!

This is a beginning exploration from Dark Ecology:

“The holism in which the whole is greater than sum of its parts depends on some (false) concept of smooth, homogeneous universality or space or infinity. It depends, in short, on a Euclidean anthropocentric geometry. Since they do not fit into the quaint category of space, what hyperobjects reveal to us humans is that the whole is always weirdly less than the sum of its parts. Take the new cities springing up, megacities such as Houston. For architects and urban planners, megacities are hard to conceptualize: where do they start and stop? Can one even point to them in a straightforward way? And isn’t it strange that entities so obviously gigantic and so colossally influential on their surroundings and economies worldwide should be so hard to point to? The fact that we can’t point to megacities is deeply because we’ve been looking in the wrong place for wholes. We keep wondering when the pieces will add up to something much greater. But now that we are truly aware of the global (as in global warming), we know that a megacity is a place among places, that is to say a finitude that contains all kinds of other finitudes, fragile and contingent. Like Doctor Who’s TARDIS, it's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Places contain multitudes.”

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