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notes for the first volume of the dust and shadow reader[s] (a publication)

contents/extracts/fragments

misc…

“Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time.” –J.G. Ballard. The Atrocity Exhibition.

“Spectrality, the way a thing keeps exceeding itself, or is displaced from itself, or is ecstatically outside itself (ekstasis, “ex-sistence”), doesn’t just belong to human being […] Humankind is flickering, displaced from itself, ecstatic, rippling and dappled with shadows. Shadows made not only by some other entity interacting with it, like the sun through the trees, but shadows that are an intrinsic part of the thing.” –Timothy Morton. Humankind.

“brushing against, licking or irradiating are also access modes as valid (or as invalid) as thinking.” –Timothy Morton, Humankind.

“nobody has ever been animist because one is never animist “in general,” always in the terms of an assemblage that produces or enhances metamorphic (magic) transformation in our capacity to affect and be affected – that is also to feel, think, and imagine. Animism may, however, be a name for reclaiming these assemblages because it lures us into feeling that their efficacy is not ours to claim. Against the insistent poisoned passion of dismembering and demystifying, it affirms what it is they all require in order not to devour us – that we are not alone in the world.” –Isabelle Stengers. Reclaiming Animism.

“Dust is everywhere because its source is everything. Its most remote origins in time and space are the Big Bang, collapsing stars, and the dark line across the center of the Milky Way, which, according to astronomer Donald Brownlee, “is a line of dirt perhaps 65,200 light­ years across, and 3.832 X 1017 miles long.” Here on earth, dust comes from everything under the sun: minerals, seeds, pollen, insects, molds, lichens, and even bacteria. Its sources also include bone, hair, hide, feather, skin, blood, and excrement. And things of human fabrication, too numerous to mention, also cover the earth and all the atmosphere with dust.” –Joseph A. Amato. Dust.

“How other kinds of beings see us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things. If jaguars also represent us—in ways that can matter vitally to us—then anthropology cannot limit itself just to exploring how people from different societies might happen to represent them as doing so. Such encounters with other kinds of beings force us to recognize the fact that seeing, representing, and perhaps knowing, even thinking, are not exclusively human affairs.” –Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (2013)

“I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look at where objectifying it has gotten us. To subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt, colonize, exploit. Rather, it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination.” –Ursula K. Le Guin, “Deep in Admiration”

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