“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


Wednesday, May 20, 2009

The Mesh

I'll be presenting this talk at a very interesting conference in Santa Barbara on friday. It's called Beyond Environmentalism. Elaine Scarry and Ursula Heise are keynoting. My talk is based on a concept from my new book The Ecological Thought. The complete video is now uploading to iTunes U, in my podcast class Literature and the Environment. You can already download three smaller file versions from the same place.

The Mesh

4 comments:

Sonnet L'Abbe said...

This brief talk is awesome. Are those axia yours or are they from a source I should recognize?

My name is Sonnet - I'm a writer currently doing a PhD at UBC on botanical metaphors of 'personal' or 'spiritual' growth, looking at why dendritic figures are used to figure 'human' capacity (extra-rational) framed as spiritual and for abstractions of governance structures. I'm all over 18th cent and Romantic sensitive plants and feeling daffodils these days.

This is only my first time hearing about your work with the idea of mesh. A thought: Mesh has a fabricky quality to me, and :. a unity of that fabric (is that spacetime and us then, the w/holes?) - i'll be interested to read more about why you chose that figure. Did you consider array?

Of course your closer of Darwin's branch as thinking material pleases me greatly!

Looking forward to working my way through this whole blog.

Timothy Morton said...

Hi Sonnet, yes, the axia are mine. I'm so glad you like the talk. Your diss. subject sounds very interesting, and I imagine you may have looked at Deleuze and Guattari, no?

I did consider array—it's a good word. "Mesh" seems more like something you're caught in. The rest of that talk is on YouTube if you're interested. There's a higher quality version on iTunes if you click on iTunes U, then Universities and Colleges, then UC Davis—or search for "Literature and the Environment."

Please let me know what you think of the rest of the blog.

Are you writing your diss. now or are you about to do your qualifying exam?

Ted Bagley said...

I like the mesh being what is twisted together in a cord for a thread. A twist of meaning with space around it. In a Buddhist sense, like a sutra. The mesh that sutures everything together in the way of language while having a remaining space undetected.

Richard Booth said...

In The Mesh 2 video, you say that we should read conservatives like Dawkins. What about Dawkins is conservative?