tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post2762988069373108140..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: It’s Co-implicated, AVMEO: Drifting with John Muir, Speaking Stones, and a Slower (Non)humanitiesCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-11133482949932170722011-03-20T15:19:47.732-04:002011-03-20T15:19:47.732-04:00The Muir passage beautifully gets at what Jane Ben...The Muir passage beautifully gets at what Jane Bennett so frequently urges, cultivating an openness to the vibrancy of the matter in our world, and passing that vibrancy along through our style of writing.<br /><br />And I very much like the style in which this piece is written. Here's a sentence that stands out:<br />These continuous connections – stone, keyboard, kiwi, you the reader – shouldn’t primarily lead to the complications of causality, origin, and distance, for they fundamentally take us to the weird joys, strange horizons, and new modes of being that co-implicated assemblages afford. And they should at least drift us away from the bullying terms of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism.<br /><br />The listening/composition/slow recording you advocate does a good job of performing the luminous (?) comimplicatedness you describe, of enabling the non-human to speak.<br /><br />And of course I like that your speaking object is a stone. Rocks are too often take as mute -- but as Jan Zalasiewicz has shown, <a href="http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LifeSciences/HistoryPhilosophyofBiology/?view=usa&ci=9780199569700" rel="nofollow">the history of the cosmos from the Big Bang to the present might be spoken by a pebble</a>, if we slow down enough to listen.<br /><br />Related to this post, and to slowing down and speeding up, and to Zalasiewicz: <a href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/03/age-of-man/kolbert-text" rel="nofollow">we perhaps live in a geologic epoch that could be called the Anthropocene.</a>Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.com