Civilization’s bondage breeds longing that becomes worship of a transfigured nature

Evidence

For we can now move from the postmodernist text to the equally postmodernist mound and ask ourselves whether — far from marking the place of Nature — it does not rather constitute something like the grave of Nature, as the latter has systematically been eclipsed from the object world and the social relations of a society whose tendential domination over its Other (the nonhuman or the formerly natural) is more complete than at any other moment in human history. From that perspective, as the mourning for a lost object which can scarcely even be remembered as such, the path back through the other objects shows them radically modified and transformed as well. The doorframe — the metonym of human habitation and the social — now turns out to have been not merely cultural, and a representation, but a nostalgic representation of a more natural form of dwelling. It now “opens the door” to a host of economic and historical anxieties about real estate speculation and the disappearance of the construction of older single-family housing which are the other face of the “postmodern” in our own time, and which then draw the landscape painting after themselves into a whole new social reality in which, from a document of cultural history, it becomes an antique and a commodity, a bit of yuppie furnishing, and in that sense no less “contemporary” than its postmodern opposite number. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 396 (#complicates, via linked claim)

But in any case, the more the traits and proportions of a woman seemed contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 351 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Civilization’s history is sacrifice turned inward as renunciation; Romanticized nature and desire directly translate rather than oppose capital — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 460; The image of uninhibited vitality itself recycles commodity fetishism (+13 more)

Broader Connections

• Civilization’s history is sacrifice turned inward as renunciation #expands (0.78)
• Desiring woman as transfigured nature drives men to make her artificial #expands (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 351
• Postmodern nature imagery memorializes a nature already systemically eliminated by capitalism #complicates (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 396
• Romanticized nature and desire directly translate rather than oppose capital #complicates (0.75) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 460
• The noble savage image framed colonized peoples as noble in their wildness #exemplifies (0.75) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 651
• Civilization recreates the sacrificial situation it claims to abolish #expands (0.74) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 106
• The image of uninhibited vitality itself recycles commodity fetishism #complicates (0.72)
• Colonial desires transformed tangible wealth into myths and mystical significance #exemplifies (0.72) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 586
• Woman’s subjugation symbolizes the mastery of nature that defines civilization #expands (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 255
• European civilization rests on a hidden underground history of displaced instincts #expands (0.70)
• Resisting capitalism requires a subjective revolution toward love and unity with nature #responds-to (0.70) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 499