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An opportunity to hear one of Australia’s leading thinkers reflect on the philosophical challenges of living in a recalcitrant environment:

Australia’s natural water body is, as it were, too humid to be relied upon. It spreads out and refuses to solidise. It collects in billabongs and necklaces of ponds that do not communicate with one another, and cannot be accumulated.

Alongside the desiccation of parts of the planet, thinking also grows drier. Instrumental reasoning not only fails to imagine the reciprocities that inform living human and non-human regions – and their exchange – but actively inhibits a capacity to narrate these. In effect, the disparagement of concrete thinking mediated through metaphors of all kinds is a leaching of language that directly impoverishes the physical and the psychic domain.
Paul Carter is Professor of Creative Place Research at Deakin University. His book Dark Writing: geography, performance, design was published in the Institute’s Writing Past Colonialism series in 2009. His new book is entitled Ground Truthing: Explorations in a Creative Region.

Event details :

Paul Carter ‘Dry Thinking and Human Futures’
Thursday 29 April 2010, 7:30-9:00pm
Institute of Postcolonial Studies
78-80 Curzon Street
North Melbourne (map)
Tel: 03 9329 6381
Admission – $5 for waged, $3 for unwaged, and free for members