“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


Saturday, November 14, 2015

Every Kitchen Sink

Seriously, in the last 36 hours I've been called sexist, racist, supporter of neoliberalism, and nazi. This is because I wanted to say “humpback whale, spoon, quasar,”--at a posthumanism conference...

Mind you, not everyone was like that.

But it's odd. Erik Davis had a good idea. There must be a term for supporting a boundary that otherwise one thinks shouldn't exist, or shouldn't exist so rigidly. What is that word?

Cos I'm like, posthumanism, great! Pencil! Tree frog! Gamma ray burst! But somehow that's wrong. Very wrong.

Like in one instance, I was a nazi for using nouns. This was in fact the substance of someone's talk. Tim Morton, literally, this Tim who is writing this, is a nazi because nouns imply something very very bad. I think maybe something like objectification, stasis, not caring about fluids and in particular body fluids.

He don't know me vewy well. And anyway: river!

And he did use a lot of adjectives, to get back at me. But he also said “Sperm! Shit! Blood!”

All sacred substances in the Vajrayana, y'know...

But if you think about it, thinking that nouns are evil like that, that's your own projection right there. People hear the word “object” and it becomes a mirror of their beliefs...about objects. Which they put onto us lot. Usually these beliefs are the exact opposite of OOO.

Like for example, if you think that being isn't presence, you're not going to say "Gamma ray burst!" in an objectifying way.

If you think being isn't presence, you're not going to be opposed to movement. Like movement is wrong! Relations are wrong! Hahahahaha! Like “You like green but I like purple, so you're bad.” Whoah!

And like, hyperobjects, they're viscous...they stick to you...I even use Kristeva to describe them!

Ack!

And...double trouble...this is a literature conference. So people are often like “You used the wrong word/a bad word/a word I don't like/You should have said this/You should have namechecked that.”

Like in one of those hiphop albums from about 1989 where everyone, everyone is namechecked.

After all that namechecking, humpback whale mentioning is totally out of the question...again...




2 comments:

D. E.M. said...

For some reason, in that list from sexist to nazi, it was you being called neoliberal that made me flinch the most. Now that's just mean!

Unknown said...

OMG. Yes. Like the humpback whale in the subsequent post, that talk made me more than just a little squirmy. Sigh.