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• 1 2022-11-20T19:57:07-08:00 E-concept: River-World 8 Anastasia Kim plain 2022-12-04T19:26:33-08:00 “I propose a river-world as an e-concept, which “can be defined as a physical, social, or virtual network consisting of many links between key nodes such as plants, animals, or humans which multiply geometrically in number with each new added node. The combined effect of these links on a node is enough to pull other nodes in and to reinforce current connections to the river-world to such an extent that it is often difficult to change or escape it – or even to realise that other river-worlds exist in parallel. I diagram a singular river world and its parallels below:” (Kim in ‘Theory of River-worlds: An Eco-critical Praxis’)
  
  Clusters or collections of at least two river-worlds I dub seas, and the complete entirety of all river worlds oceans, to describe the universe not in terms of matter or phenomena, but in terms of the flow of connections, perspectives, consciousness, agents, and ontpowers.
  To navigate these river-worlds, seas, and oceans, I propose the need for a guide who will act as a source or channel into each river-world, for the human is blind and ignorant of anything other than the human river-world. Furthermore, they must possess an awareness of their own lack of knowledge, curiosity, and be ready to ask for aid – all the while appreciating the new river-world, and bringing energy and life into their new ambience by giving and receiving results or evidence of their progress in thinking ecologically.
  In this way, what Timothy Morton describes as ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ ecomimesis – where the former evokes an environment while the other the situatedness of writing – can be considered as a discussion of an individual not thinking ecologically and ignorant to other river-worlds, and those who are aware of their situatedness are aware of other river-worlds, seas, and oceas, and even experts in the field. Likewise, ecomimesis emphasises situatedness, environment, and ambiance over the speaker or writer which the theory of riverworlds stresses in the importance of no matter who is journeying through them. The subject travelling through and learning to think ecologically is just as much precarious. I hence fit my e-concept as another sub-category of eco-criticism.
  One of the beauties of a theory of river-worlds is it possesses a marked similarity and cohesiveness with other concepts, such as those of the emerging worlds and Anna Tsing’s statement on the importance of "previously unrecognized galaxies of multicultural and multispecies relations plus life - enhancing relations among non - living elements of the earth." It describes very much flows and forces that are always alive, self-reinforcing, affective, and signaling. Critical posthumanism, too, can be fit under the umbrella of river-worlds, for it argues for a “becoming” and interconnectedness between things, which encourages us to cross those ontological boundaries and the produce new unprecedented biological, social, and technical ways of being.
  As a result, it can help us understand an alternative to the proposed desconstruction of nature/culture divisions as put forward by the idea of naturecultures, and offers a continuum that can lie anywhere within the radius of a singular river-world, rather than on the other end of the spectrum in a linear manner. It offers us a method by which to navigate the decentering of humanity from ontological, ethical, political and cultural narratives, whilst simultaneously questioning the construction of the category ‘human’.
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