3 Still life in nearly present time
The object of nature
If winds, currents, glaciers, volcanoes, etc., carry subtle messages that are so difficult
to read that it takes us absolutely ages trying to decipher them, wouldn’t it be
appropriate to call them intelligent? How would it be if it turned out that we were
only the slowest and least intelligent beings in the world?
(Serres 1995: 30)It is not enough to say the subject is constituted in a symbolic system.... It is [also]
constructed in real practices.
(Foucault 198 4 : 369)What happens if the half-second delay is set, not in a super-sensible domain, but in
the corporealisation of culture and the culturalisation of corporeality?
(Connolly 1999: 20)Introduction: towards a genealogy of background
In this chapter, I want to make an argument concerning the importance of nature,
the body and time in Western societies. It is not, I think, the usual kind of argu-
ment, based upon genealogical accounts of the rise and fall of discourses like
romanticism or modernism (which is not to say that elements of these accounts
do not adhere). Rather, it is an attempt to strike out towards a new understanding
of how nature is apprehended, based upon giving much greater credence to that
small but vitally significant period of time in which the body makes the world
intelligible by setting up a background of expectation which, I will go on to argue,
is much of what we feel as ‘nature’.
In a sense, what I want to do is to restate some of the current concerns of the
turn to a vitalist conception of the world. But I want to do so in a way which goes
beyond the general and sometimes rather portentous philosophical statements
about time, the body and becoming, which have now become so familiar (e.g.
Grosz 1999), by connecting up with understandings of body practices from the
social sciences – and capitalist business.
Using these resources, I want to argue that nature has become a, and perhaps
even the, key site of contemplation and mysticism in the modern world as a result
of the evolution of a set of body practices which, as they have taken hold, have