Spike Q&A: Is the body the last thing left alive?
Winter 2020
Everything in my son’s life is animate. If his head hits the corner of a table, he’ll say: naughty table. Instinctively, we might reply that it was an accident, that it’s not the table that’s bad; things just happen. It’s what we’ll say for the rest of our lives. It’s a coincidence – there is no life in all this but yours and others’, and there is absolutely no connection between you, here, reading this, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Faced with cosmologies that differ from this one, we’re told: don’t anthropomorphise a tree, or a mountain. Don’t animate what we’re trying to drill down into, what we’re mining, what we need to cut down. The word “management” joins the word “forest,” and environmental disasters become mere contingencies in a planet ruled by the forces of intention. Management makes no mistakes. This is how tree and mountain, and everything else besides, get murdered before they’re even touched. As Judith Butler reminds us, only that which can be mourned is worthy of living. So, cut the mournable and you cut your losses. Identity over here; coincidence over there. Make a grid, and avoid the obscenity of chaos and chance.
Imagine: you say something, and because you say it, something happens (holes in the ground, loss of life, poisoned waters, burning forests). But curses remind us of the tangle of symbol and thing, the materiality of metaphor. They remind us that representations are not just acts of looking at what is at stake; they are a fundamental part of what it is we behold. Narrative, storytelling, imagination, love, care, and agency are interdependent.