Roads
The Great Highway Squid System, New Jersey
This is an aerial image of the highway system close to Newark airport in central New Jersey. I took this on my recent flight to L.A to attend the MLA conference. That the early morning sun and the snow on the ground made everything look golden and silver at the same time is one thing, but how the roadway looks like a giant squid (with a jug handle) is quite another. It confirms my suspicion that roads are really tentacles and all the seemingly inanimate, inorganic objects that make up most of our civilization bound world are all oddly alive in a way that we will never really see or know. To figure out the sense of the one mortal life that each of us is charged with in relation to the other mortal lives around us seems overwhelming enough, to add the life of the inanimate to the list would seem all together too much. Yet, that is where literary-philosophical thought seems to be progressing.
Non-human lives and post-humanism seemed to underwrite a lot of the papers I heard at the MLA. The point there was not so much that we need to accord humanity to non-human things but that our version of the human is shaped by the inanimate, non-human, technologically animate things that we surround ourselves with. To understand ourselves we needn’t locate the center in us any longer, or start with ourselves any longer but look at the movements, affordances and appurtenances which occasion our humanity. The heliocentric universe was supposed to have dislocated the earth and its inhabitants from the false presumption of centrality in all things but the sun is too powerful a metaphor to not inhabit or give up to the margins. So the call is to decentralize, put power in the tips of the tentacles and all along its way, to know that the automotive-ants that crawl along it crawl with a kind of mechano-life that we would do well to acknowledge as our own.
Angled for Mine Eyes 