“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, February 29, 2012

I Just Wrote This Abstract for My Essay on Ecology and Objects

What is called subjectivity is really just a small region of a much larger space of interactions between beings: coffee cups, sea foam, flakes of obsidian and nebulae. To realize this is to enter into a larger world in which humans coexist with a plenitude of uncanny entities that for shorthand's sake my essay calls objects. Ecological awareness just is the human attunement to this coexistence. Many of these objects are large enough to contain humans: biosphere, climate, evolution. The ecological emergency, then, is also an ontological emergency, in which we find ourselves inside an object, or rather, a whole series of them.

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