“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


Sunday, February 10, 2013

Object-Oriented Squid

The stubborn resistance of objects is aggravating to humans. It is as though humans are called from above to (in)form a specific object. There are humans whose calling it is to (in)form stones, others whose calling it is to (in)form language, and those who have missed their calling seem to be leading a false existence, a false Dasein. For the feedback loop—the relationship—between a specific object and a specific human is finely tuned and, over the course of its development, this relationship changes both the object and the human. To repeat, humans live as functions of their objects.
--Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, 63

From Cary Wolfe's new Posthumanities publication.

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