“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


Thursday, September 15, 2011

OOOIII: Ian Bogost, "Seeing Things"


Seeing Things - OOOIII from Ian Bogost on Vimeo.

The understated elegance and power of this short video, which really says it all, is a thing to behold. I'm just sad Ian wasn't there himself. But this is a superb thing to emerge from that absence.

5 comments:

Awaking Lucid said...

fantastic. thanks

Stephen said...

Not sure if anyone is still following this post, but...

I am no philosopher, so advance apologies in that regard all around. Actually,it is precisely such expertise that I need to better understand the "what for" of the ideas championed in this wonderful video essay. Here are my questions.

Is OOO as strongly related to certain strains of phenomenology as it seems?

Is the apparent equivocation between an anti-narrative on the one hand, and an implicit confirmation of narrative as inescapable on the other, intentional or problematic? Or is it more like an extra-narrative -- narrative not so much denied but merely demoted (if so this seems not so new to me)? And if OOO tends more toward the extremes there, does it confront/embrace/locate the various -isms it thereby undergirds (relativism and primitivism are the two most troubling that come to mind), or ignore them as "not my problem" problems? That is, I intuit that this philosophy is deeply (and perhaps inadvertently) conservative-- how do I have that wrong?

sangeeta said...

To Stephen: I dont think you are wrong

sangeeta said...

I dont think you are wrong, Stephen.

sangeeta said...

I dont think you arw wrong, Stephen