“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


Friday, June 15, 2012

Nice One Ian

“ We can imagine scores of bizarro Levinases, little philosopher machines sent into the sensual interactions of objects like planetary rovers. Their mission: to characterize the internal, withdrawn subjectivities of various objects, by speculating on how object–object caricatures reflect possible codes of value and response. Object ethics, it would seem, can only ever be theorized once-removed, phenomenally, the parallel universes of private objects cradled silently in their cocoons, even while their surfaces seem to explode, devour, caress, or murder one another.”

1 comment:

cgerrish said...

This bit: "sent into the sensual interactions of objects like planetary rovers" strikes me as a form of "man is the measure of all things" except in a McLuhanesque move "man" is extended to include an assemblage of objects that report back the sensual interactions that we call measurements. When you shoot a photon at a particle to measure it, you're eavesdropping on an interaction between two objects.