“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, January 9, 2016

Dark Ecology Nice Bit

I'm reading the second set of proofs. Ian Bogost saw a mockup version at the MLA yesterday, and its size and chunkiness is as lovely as expected. But look at this:

The very concept of “world” as the temporality region suffused with human destiny emerges from agrilogistic functioning. World, as Heidegger knew, is normative: the concept works if some beings have it and some don’t. When, like Jakob von Uexküll, you start to realize that at least all lifeforms have a world, you have begun to cheapen the concept almost to worthlessness. The concept reaches zero when humans realize that there is no “away,” that there is no background to their foreground despite the luxury holiday ads, a lack of a stage set on which world can perform, a lack that is evident in the return of culturally (and physically) repressed “pollution” and awareness of the consequences of human action on nonhumans. The end of the biosphere as we know it is also the end of the “world” as a normative and useful concept.

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