“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


Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Statement of Intent

This is a pretty neat one, from my essay “Ecology” from Imre Szeman's Fueling Culture, coming out soon.

When we divide the world into the categories nature and culture, we are performing the quintessential gesture of modernity. But modernity is predicated on the ecological emergency that has given rise to a totally new geological period: the Anthropocene. “Modernity” is how the Anthropocene has appeared to us historically thus far. Dividing the world into nature and culture is precisely anti-ecological, insofar as it participates in the logistics that enabled humans to act as a geophysical force on a planetary scale. The Anthropocene is also the moment at which Western philosophy decided to restrict itself to the (human) subject–world correlate (Meillassoux 2009:  5). This self-imposed blindness to the real seems to go hand in hand with the direct intervention in the geological real.

1 comment:

cgerrish said...

In a sense, it's also the creation of the "away."