(Eko)krytyka czystej percepcji
(Eco)criticism of Pure Perception

Summary/Abstract: In this excerpt from his 2003 book "Virtually Wild: Wilderness, Technology and the Ecology of Mediation" Tomasz Sikora looks at how the modern subject constitutes itself through a perceptual appropriation of “nature” or “wilderness,” an appropriation that is always already mediated through technology, even though this fact tends to be denied or forgotten. The (mostly American) idea of pure, unmediated or transparent perception, as an attribute of a primordial, wild or uncontamnated self, is critiqued with a view to developing a different ecocritical way of thinkng about the relationship between “self” and “world.” It is mostly through a reading of two poems: “An Anectode of the Jar” by Wallace Stevens and “Hawk on a Wire” by Nelson C. Sager that the article illustrates both the (Western/American) fantasy to perceive the world in a “pure” way and, ultimately, the impossibility of such perception. Instead of the false natural-technological binary, the author postulates that a new ecological awareness should focus on the process of mediation (or the medium) itself.

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