Jimmie Killingsworth ([info]jimmiebluegoose) wrote,
@ 2006-01-04 13:37:00
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The Natural IS Virtual
Instead of a continuum, try this idea, taking old Lyotard at his word: the natural IS virtual. "Nature" is totally constructed, meaning that it's something philosophers and poets and theologians made up. It's a word, a concept. It's not the things of the earth so much as the essence of the earth as distilled through the copper coils of categorical thinking.

So it's just possible that nature nerds—environmentalists, bird watches, etc.—are committed more to the idea of nature than to the earth itself. It's something that's made up more of their desires and fantasies than of anything muddy or leafy or feathery. It's just electrons sparking in the brain. In this sense, nerdism is a commitment to something other than the standard set of desires and fantasies, those approved or certified by corporate life—"society." The felt experience of opposition is crucial in nerdism. My set of desires and fantasies—whether "natural" or "technological"—feels different from what I see on television and in the department stores.

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My rambling
[info]myrthart
2006-01-05 06:06 am UTC (link)
But the dirt and trees and birds would exist whether people had a name for them or not. Computers and technology would not exist without human ideas--without the invention of zero. To me, this gives them a great amount of value. Life. But, I wonder if people realize that nature can exist without them. I wonder if the bird nerd realizes that if he never checks a blue footed booby off his list, it makes no difference to the booby at all. The booby will sit in the sun and eat and be part of the earth all the same. Sometimes I don't think people realize that nature exists above them rather than because of them and that is when they devalue it into a concept. It even makes me wonder if environmentalists with their nature preserves are a little egocentrical. As if they didn't perserve nature, it would perish. Yet a volcano, a hurricane, an earthquake can destroy people like we destroy ants. Nuclear war vs. volcano. Would nature perish without its protecting people? We are its protectors and its destroyers. Maybe it needs both. Maybe it doesn't need anything. Maybe nature is above needing.
You raise interesting questions here... This is my favorite post thus far.

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(Anonymous)
2006-03-04 10:21 pm UTC (link)
Perhaps part of the feeling of difference/opposition with Post-War II American forms of preoccupation (malls and TV) are because one is indeed different. If a tech/enviro nerd were, say, transported to another environment where people did not typically have such things, as malls and TV, or filled their time with other things like cutting peat, playing music in the local pub, and checking their computers occasionally for mail orders, then would the feeling of difference/opposition/maybe alienation dissipate? I don't think that there has to be a sense of alienation associated with difference. It is just different, completely value-free. Perhaps the important thing is respect for difference. Maybe the uncomfortableness of nerdiness is that one does not feel that one's differences are respected. I had the experience of being in a pub in Edinburgh in which one woman, probably in her 50's, was working on a crossword puzzle, a man and woman in their 30's were playing chess, a mother and her two daughter were at another table sharing a drink, and the group of musicians (a ceilidh) consisted of a 10ish year old fiddle player, "accordion" player probably in his 70's, a woman playing a soprano recorder (probably in her 40's), and several other men were playing the fiddle (one 20-something with spikyish hair, the others seemed middle-aged). Maybe our sense of societal homogeneity is an allusion. We are all very different, but it would be nice not to feel like one has to justify that difference all of the time. Maybe society should be like an expanded version of a pub. What is it about American society that makes the integration of difference feel uncomfortable? I don't know, I only know that semantically America is one the least respectful cultures, maybe the disrespect is carried beyond the manners of language to the social realm. Maybe the idea of nature will have to do until one can get back to the muddy, leafy, and feathery. It's all right though, it makes for wonderful poetry and music in the meantime. As far as tehno nerdiness, I will say this, some of the most technologically sophisticated websites I have even seen have been associated with some of the remotest places on earth, which indicates that an integration between the natural and the technical is more than possible, it's almost crucial...but what do I know.

Love your blogsite,
Flora

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