“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


Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Cats Happen

I just wrote this in Dark Ecology, hahaha:

The ambiguous status of cats is not quite the “companion species” Haraway thinks through human coexistence with dogs. Within agrilogistical social space cats stand for the ontological ambiguity of lifeforms and indeed of things at all. Cats are a neighbor species. Too many concepts are implied in the notion of “companion.” The penetrating gaze of a cat is used as the gaze of the extraterrestrial alien, because cats are the intraterrestrial alien. Cats just happen. “Cats happen” would be a nicely ironic agrilogistical T-shirt slogan.

2 comments:

Derek Woods said...

Terry O'Connor on the longue duree of cats in 'Animals as Neighbors'

Anonymous said...

Spokesvulture for Felines