The straight line, and everything it enables, such as right angles and regular geometric figures, is an astonishing invention. The straight edges of crystals might have been noticed by our stone tool making ancestors, and some grasses have straight stalks, but otherwise straight lines in nature are very rare. As I sit and look out at a human environment entirely built on straight lines and regular curves I can’t help but admire the imagination and will that has cut through the irregularities and digressions of nature to impose something new and unprecedented on the world… it is the very image of how human society has distinguished itself from everything else, to make a safe space for the body and a formative, limiting space for the mind… the speed of our labours is nothing compared to the rapidity of our thought. The speed of thought must have evolved to exceed the reaction time of animals—we could draw conclusions from observation, make plans and act before lunch got away— but the movement of our minds is on a completely other scale than any aspect of nature. The physical motion of living things is slower, the growth and development of any organism slower still, the capacity of the environment to neutralize all the toxins we’ve dumped into it yet slower, evolution still slower, and geological time massively slow, in proportion as its productions are also massive. Meanwhile the human mind can range from the Big Bang to the end of time in an instant.
Anthropocene
Superconversation 25: Thomas Elliott responds to Lesley Green, “The Changing of the Gods of Reason”
. . . How could human beings decolonize their minds when neoliberalism radically structures human identities and the seemingly bleak future of organic life on Earth? In the absence of remediation of the geological-agental consequences of the nihilistic cycle of consumption and pollution upon which capitalocentrism utterly depends, how could new worlds emerge? Is it enough to spirit away statues, or is something more radical demanded?
Superconversation 14: Rachael Rakes responds to Pedro Neves Marques, “Look Above, The Sky is Falling: Humanity before and after the end of the world”
No animal—and least of all a human—can be considered individual because of its reliance on and mutual exchange of symbiotic microrganisms. Our most fundamental existence is codependent . . . One way of attempting to philosophize ourselves out of the Anthropocene has been to try to consider ourselves objects and others. These turns in realism represent a capitulation to all of that which will survive us—our inert creations, our archives, our infrastructures, our garbage. It is a resignation to the inability of humanity to survive, and a validation of the object as the sole locus of value—especially of lasting value.