Against Nature, Toward Objects

What do you see?

"The time has come to rethink wilderness."

• Nature is not the sublime
• Nature is not the frontier
• Nature is not something to be reclaimed

Nature is: 

"...a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made."

—Cronon

Nature was:

"...'deserted,' 'desolate,' 'barren,'—in short, a 'waste'..."

The Sublime

Nature had to become sacred for it to be changed from something evil and dangerous and of the devil. 

Wordsworth

"Were all like workings of one mind, the features

Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;

Characters of the great Apocalypse,..."

Thoreau

"His words took the physical mountain on which he stood and transmuted it into an icon of the sublime: a symbol of god's presence on earth."

In the frontier, in nature:

• we imbue the frontier with the thing we claim we don't want
• nature cannot be devoid of us
• "...wilderness represents a flight from history." (10)

Nature Paradox

"...wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is outside the natural" (11).

Further Paradox

We imagine nature needs saving, from us, and the very entities trying to "save" it.

Item: "...if nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves" (13). 

Cronon:

"The striking power of the wild is that wonder in the face of it requires no act of will, but forces itself upon us—as an expression of the nonhuman world experienced through the lens of our cultural history—as proof that ours is not the only presence in the universe."

Things:

• "...are there but are not there..." (Morton 16)
• Withdrawal is not sealing off or a void (16)
• Image: petrified slab of ancient mud with a dinosaur's footprint
• Question: what else might be the image of the thing withdrawn?
• Morton on OOO

"Action at a distance happens all the time if causation is aesthetic. What is called consciousness is action at a distance. Indeed, we could go so far as to say that consciousness-of anything is action at a distance" (Morton 21).

Object relations

This idea, that objects are somehow imbued with intrinsic properties that we unlock somehow, is central to the way we think about how objects "perform." The flute is "played" by me because I have done something to it. 

Object Relations

• relations are always already happening
• we are composed of many objects & yet are only us
• Let's watch a clip!