“There is pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea and the music in its roar;
I love not man the less, but Nature more."
Lord Byron
The wilderness has had an extraordinary allure on people's imagination since the beginning of time... the mere illusion of it, the risks, the faith it implies, the mystery, the fantasy, the possibilities. It's been interesting to observe how for a lot of us in the course, Second Life has proved to be as wild and foreign as a vast patch of Real Life land.
I went to see Into The Wild last week. I really thought I was over my Second Life 'high' but the Lord Byron quote that opened it brought me straight back again. I ended up thinking about Second Life all throughout the movie. Alex's eagerness to explore unknown grounds reminded me of my avatar overlooking the immensity and beauty of the landscape. Even in virtual worlds we continue to inspect our lifeworlds outwardly, but at the same time we almost never cease to travel inward.
I thought of the film a lot as I read the book Friction, particularly when the author discusses the powerful dichotomy of God and Nature. According to her "many things are said to be universal: freedom, money, love. But the two most historically successful universal claims -which continue to form exemplars for all universality- are still God and Nature." (Friction, p. 88) Our bonds to God and to Nature, as individual as they may be, also profoundly link us to one another.
The book is very precise in its descriptions. For example the semiotic analysis of a/the globe as a unit, logo, dynamic, expression, very clearly depicts what many refer to when speaking of universality. Anne Lowenhaupt Tsing talks about it as a "dream space" that we can all access through modernity, political freedom and science. It all really does sound cozy and prosperous when you read it here but then she precedes to point out to us, amongst other things, that the majority of the world's population are minorities and that corporate growth destroys its own resources.
Friction is all around.
Friction is quite an ample term but yet so well accommodated within her theories. "As a metaphorical image, friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power" (Friction, p. 5) As I read I kept thinking about the fact that my laptop computer picks up about 20 different wireless networks within a block's radius but all of them are weak; I remembered my past relationships and how the most complicated ones have also been the most significative; I thought about the ITTO and the idea of having a global management regime for the use of the world's forests (!)
World transition and evolution will be awkward. Global interconnection is mediated -both positively and negatively- precisely by these lags in the flow of knowledge, goods, supplies, even people. From a late bus to the discrepancies in 'political ecology', where human interactions and the environment "respond to social and political coercions - not just the pressure of numbers." (Friction, p. 173) The ethnographic deconstruction of the Indonesian case serves as a great example of the clash of capitalist interests and the diversity of the rainforest... another great analogy in itself.
Even though I am yet to be done reading, I highly recommend this book.
T
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