“we turn toward things when words won’t do”
“we find voice in the material world and its muteness”
““A pebble is not an easy thing to define,” writes Francis Ponge in the The Voice of Things (Le parti pris des choses). Ponge continues: “On this subject let me not be reproached for going even farther back than the Flood.””
“the lithic has been thought of as cold and inert, the unchanging foil to life’s rapid evolution”
“If our historic engagement with stone is the story of cave painting, toolmaking, and home building, Cohen wants to recover a secret history that moves beyond such utilitarian domination. His version is about collaboration and gregarious commingling between humans and stones.”
“Cohen zooms out from a pebble to a planet and finds “a durable link to a dynamic cosmos.””
““Within a geological scale of time,” he writes, “medieval authors are our contemporaries.””
“In a nice turn of phrase, Cohen wants Stonehenge, a time-bound structure, to be also “time-binding”: a terra firma upon which to shore the detritus of history.”
“Stone contributes to some of the livelier debates churning in the wake of critical theory’s latest turns. It draws upon the work of thinkers associated with environmental studies, posthumanism, new materialism, object-oriented ontology, and the “geologic turn” of cultural studies.”
“If there is a vector to unite these various camps, it is an instinct that the boundaries between the self and world are not as clear-cut as our Enlightenment inheritance claims. If the word “object” comes with an etymological sense of being “thrown” before the subject, perhaps things have been trying to get our attention all along.”
“The best contemporary theoretical treatments of objects show how interpenetrating bodies – what Deleuze and Guatarri call assemblages – can accomplish things that would be impossible for a human subject acting in isolation.”
“Actor Network Theory (ANT), associated with Bruno Latour, provides a framework to explain how non-human actors are continually recruited through social relations to become quasi-subjects with agency.”
“When seeking to understand the messy entanglement of humans, machines, corporations, social movements, and the physical environment, ANT provides an elegant solution.”
“Graham Harman and Levi Bryant have both laid the groundwork for an object-oriented ontology, whose acronym (OOO) looks suspiciously like three boulders abreast. These new ontologies diffuse the humanist subject into what Bryant calls “the democracy of objects,” and put the final nail in the coffin of The Great Chain of Being.”
“Meanwhile, “deep ecology” — a rebranded pantheism for the secular age, the Gaia hypothesis stripped of its New Age garb — has tried to rebalance the needs of humans with the needs of earth’s other denizens, animal, vegetable, and mineral. If there is a politics to Cohen’s project, it is to correct what he aptly labels the “tellurian enmity” of our engrained anthropocentricism. By revitalizing stone, Cohen shows how human bodies and rocks “are profoundly enmeshed within generative ecologies” — ecologies capable of reorienting our material relations, when given the chance.”
“That face gazing out from the world of objects is our own distorted reflection, made strange enough to clearly see.”
“The unacknowledged legislator of Stone could be Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky. In his essay “Art as Technique,” the critic describes how habit dulls the senses. Advocating artworks that enact a process of ostranenie or defamiliarization, he writes of making the stone once again “stony,” of imparting the sensation of things as they are first perceived.”
“We love stone, and the marks we make upon stone, and the marks stone makes upon us. Stone insists not because it is so different from we who build families of whatever kind against cataclysm, but because of its deep affinity, its enduring tectonicity (movement, carpentry, making), its strangely inhuman (I don’t know what else to call it) love.”
“Those who cheered in Latin in the stone theaters of Bordeaux and Paris likely assumed that Rome would never fall, that the language of their shouts would be the language of that space for all time. It may well be that those who affix love locks to Parisian bridges believe their passion will not abate, that their inscribed names will signify their affection endlessly.”
“The particular is always rendered anonymous, like bones taken from graves to fashion whimsical arches in an empire of the dead. Those still in graves or those exhumed from them have no message to bear other than that time erodes memory, that time erodes substance itself. The continents we cross on airplanes are plunging slowly into sea.”
“Cohen tracks the medieval equation of Semitic souls with “harde stones” back to a perverted reading of Ezekiel 36:26.”
“One day we too will leave this dervish dance behind. Our bodies will be buried or burned, returning troves of elements to the earth. Carbon, nitrogen, and magnesium will feed a new generation of plants, which will nourish animals, including human beings. We might become part of subducting plates, plunging deep into the planet’s mantel. What enters as a loose confederation, will emerge as ordered, igneous stone.”