Heh, yeah, "ecomimesis." I'm reading this book, Ecology without Nature, that is desperately trendy with the jargon (more so even than me). It's a kind of kitchen-sink approach--some of it sticks, the rest takes too long to explain to anybody else why you're using it.
Actually, the topic of the book says a lot of things that are relevant to concerns with Pirsig. The author, Timothy Morton, is attempting to provide a poetics of nature writing, basically, though the larger aim is a new understanding of ecology. What is fascinating is how the poetics or rhetoric of nature writing dovetails with that of mysticism. I'd really thought about it like that before. For example, how does one produce the _effect_ of immediacy in one's reader? What kind of rhetorical gesture is it for a text to tell you to put down the text and go out and experience nature? "Ecomimesis" is a Greek-esque word for nature writing--the "eco" in ecology is from the Greek "oikos," for "home"; "mimesis" is Greek for "imitation" or "representation." How do we represent our home, or better for the problem of nature writing, how do we imitate that which is necessarily not the writing? What Morton is contending with is the notion of "nature" as the "background" to the foreground of human activity, the home vs. the homeowner. The most interesting thing I've put together from reading Morton is how the mystic trope of "you can only see it out of the corner of your eye" works the way it does because what is being gestured towards _is_ the corner of your eye. This is something like a transcendental reading of mysticism, but with background/foreground issues front and center you see why you can never see "it"--"it" is the background: wherever you are looking, "it" is not (because if it were, it would be the foreground, which it is not). You begin to see how the tropes, images, and metaphors are used to create particular kinds of effects. Much of the first part of the book involves going around all the ways in which nature writing tries to create its effects, and how these necessarily involve--what we would otherwise call--metaphysical tropes, like inside/outside, illusion/reality, immediacy/mediatedness. But by treating them as a series of rhetorical effects, he helps to understand how they work. This isn't exactly new, and this is the kind of understanding of mysticism I've been circling around for years (i.e. a rhetorical understanding), but the requisite frame for the discussion would seem to have been in the context of ecology. By focusing centrally on "nature," as a concept in discourse and the discourses surrounding evironmentalism and the falling apart of the earth, so much more light is shed in a compact space then I had thought possible. Matt > From: [email protected] > Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2010 14:46:36 -0400 > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [MD] Derrida and Echo > > > Thanks Matt, > > Maybe I'll try ILL. What I saw was on a NetFlix documentary on > Derrida, but he only touched on the subject. It did seem intriguing. I > liked what I saw and heard of him. > > Ecomimesis? Are you enjoying your studies? I remember reading > on your blog that you wanted a career of reading books. I could > certainly appreciate that. > > > Marsha _________________________________________________________________ The New Busy think 9 to 5 is a cute idea. Combine multiple calendars with Hotmail. http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?tile=multicalendar&ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_5 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
