“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


Thursday, March 17, 2016

Aw Someone Was Really Nice about My Avatar Essay

In “Avatar, Ecology, Thought,” Timothy Morton offers a dense analysis — the best I’ve come across to date — of James Cameron’s blockbuster film of “planetary awareness,” reading it against the grain of “normative embeddedness ideology.” As a product of cutting-edge technoscience, Avatar in fact suggests the insurmountable ontological barrier between human rationality and the world of nature, thus undermining its own apparent ideological allegiances. --Veronica Hollinger, “Curious-Anxious Late Environmentalism,” Los Angeles Review of Books

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