Story-telling is not just a property of human language, but one of the many
consequences of being thrown in a world that is, by itself, fully articulated and active.
It is easy to see why it will be utterly impossible to tell our common geostory without,
all of us — novelists, generals, engineers, scientists, politicians, activists, and citizens —
getting closer and closer within such a common trading zone.
...
The reason why such a point is always lost is because of a long history during
which the “scientific world view” has reversed this order, inventing the idea of a
“material world” in which the agency of all the entities making up the world has been
made to vanish. A zombie atmosphere, in which the official version of the “natural
world” has shrunk all the agents that the scientific and engineering professions keep
multiplying, comes from such a reversion: nothing happens any more since the agent is
supposed to be “simply caused” by its predecessor. All the action has been put in the
antecedent. The consequent could just as well not be there at all. As we say in French:
“il n’est là que pour faire de la figuration”; to play the extra. You may still list the
succession of items one after the other, but their eventfulness has disappeared. (Do
you remember learning the facts of science at school? If you were often so bored,
that’s why!). The great paradox of the “scientific world view” is to have succeeded in
withdrawing historicity from the world. And with it, of course, the inner narrativity
that is part and parcel of being in the world — or, as Donna Haraway prefers to say,
“with the world”.
just another night of mindexplode, to the soundtrack of:
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