“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, January 4, 2017

I Like This Line from This Essay I'm Proof-Reading

“In commodity fetishism, spoons and chickens don’t have agency: they become the hardware platform for capitalist software.”

3 comments:

D. E.M. said...

Word.
Derrida on the fetish as undecidable too -- the spoon and the chicken still arrive with all the energy that is at the same time denied.

John T. Maher said...

The social hieroglyph goes eternally unspoken for the critters. Virtually eveything in your material world on earth can from harming an animal. Th chorus of ghosts screams and no humans ever hears. Actually I am very curious about alternative readings of the point in your sentence.

D. E.M. said...

Tim writes about it. I hear it. You're not alone. It's the saddest thing. OOO works well for exploring the instrumentality of the chickens (et al)

I have a colleague who rejects the word "imprinting" in his studies of birds. Relationships with others, with objects-- not imprinting, if imprinting is taken to be their stupidity about bonding