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Problems in Rhetoric: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

Phase Three: Vegetable


In th is phase we confront h um an and nonh uma n env ironm en ts, which t his course t reats sym m etrica lly. Th e div ision between a hum an, or built , env ironm ent a nd a nonhum an, or na tural, env ironm ent is a t enuou s one indeed. This handout point s to a m ore nua nced u nderst anding of en viron ment s. It draws on a nth ropologist T im In golds applicat ion of Martin Heideggers notion of dwellin g .

We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is because we are dwellers To build is in itself already to dwell Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build (Heidegger, qtd. 186).

Rarely does a resident of any of the worlds greatest metropolitan areas pause to consider the complexity of urban life or the myriad systems that operate around the clock to support it: (Ascher, The Works).

But why should the products of human building be any different, in principle, from the constructions of other animals (174)?
Here, then, is the essence of the building perspective: that worlds are made before they are lived in; or in other words, that acts of dwelling are preceded by acts of worldmaking [] Human beings, then, inhabit the various houses of culture, pre-erected upon the universal ground of natureincluding the universals of human nature [] I am rather concerned to expose the assumptions entailed in making the distinction between an architecturally modified environment and what is simply called nature (179180).

Only because they already dwell therein can they think the thoughts they do (186).

For the form of the tree is no more given, as an immutable fact of nature, than is the form of the house an imposition of the human mind. Recall the many inhabitants of the tree: the fox, the owl, the squirrel, the ant, the beetle, among countless others. All, through their various activities of dwelling, have played their part in creating the conditions under which the tree, over the centuries, has grown to assume its particular form and proportions. And so, too, have human beings, in tending to the trees surroundings (187).
In a sense, the tree bridges the gap between the apparently fixed and invariant forms of the landscape and the variable and transient forms of animal life, visible proof that all of theses forms, from the most permanent to the most ephemeral, are dynamically linked under transformation with the movement of becoming of the world as a whole (204-205).

!The world itself begins to breathe" (201).

To borrow from Ian Bogost, all things dwell, yet they do not dwell equally.

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Nathaniel Rivers I English 404 I Fall 2012

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