#thingification

[gravalicious]

“Yes, and this “other thing” is essentially the erasure of Being. Towards the end of the essay I talk about this. I have always felt a bit discomforted by the whole notion of emancipation celebrations or “markings.” While I think on the one hand that it is important to mark these events, on the other hand, when you deconstruct this type of activity and question what it is we are, in fact, commemorating you realize that it has more to do with Europeans finally understanding and accepting what we, African people, knew all along, that we are first and last Beings, and that we cannot be turned into things? Hence, we will run, we will fight, we will kill, we will even kill our children rather than agree to be non-Beings? So, in a way we have always been outside of that Law, in a philosophical sense. We are still outside of the law today (and yet trapped by it) in the way the law is used to police and confine black bodies in the new prison industrial complex.”

M. NourbeSe Philip

Patricia Saunders - Defending the Dead, Confronting the Archive: A Conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip (Small Axe 26, June 2008, p 63–79)

[shrinkrants]

. . . the planet is forcefully telling us that we are not separate from her and do not stand above her. The sense that human actions are merely discrete, acultural observations seems to be increasingly, ironically, unrealistic, a little too masculine and certainly unsustainable. We are learning that we, and the ‘things’ we have named in the world, are more usefully characterised as snapshots, stills in the movie, the ongoing flow of generative processes. Selves, society and, if we take anything from quantum physics, the material world itself are composed of dynamic relationships over space and time rather than fixed, discovered things.

John Shotter, From a determinate world of separate things to an indeterminate world of inseparable flowing processes. in Understanding the Self and Others: Explorations in intersubjectivity and interobjectivity. p 31

[thingification-blog]

That which makes the body | makes the self | beyond which we are undone

[monasticcellphone]

Omigod tumblr speak of "I did a thing" or w/e is an example of the proliferation of the autonomous thing.

[wheniwantobe-blog]

Thursday, July 18 at 9pm and Saturday, July 20 at 2pm "Thingification" New York Duriel E. Harris

A one-woman show combining poetry, performance, music, & dance to invigorate audiences with the transformative energy of wordsoundpower.

"The term "thing-ification" originates in Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire, where he explains that colonization diminishes the humanity of both colonizer and colonized. There he states: colonization = thing-ification.Understanding that all oppressions are linked, I offer my one-woman show as one way to restore ourselves, celebrating our collective human potential."