Below are some notes/questions/germs that Caroline and I considered and then abandoned while strategizing for the upcoming Reclamation Reads curation.
-Arendt: Action is without end. Reclaiming/recycling/etc. is (political?) action in concert with other like-minded people and is without a definitive/immediate end. Work, on the other hand, terminates in the artifact—the product of toil, creativity, and so on. What if reclaiming could make and keep work’s promises?
-In principle, language is infinitely reusable. Moreover, it’s necessarily reusable—from anaphora at the sentence level to the grammatical rules that make repetition and transference possible. What if people took the environment as seriously as they take language? That is, what if environmental reuse were as necessary as linguistic reuse?
-Consider these oppositions (“Earth/higher power” being the bifurcating rubric under which are subsumed the following attributes and corresponding positions): Earth/higher power –> Physical/metaphysical –> observable/unobservable –> re-use/reincarnation –> anti-environmentalism/atheism. Environmental atheism? Reclamation/repurposing/recycling as a kind of salvaging and repairing—a penitence for non-belief.
RECLAMATION 