Got a live one
March 9th, 2005 at 9:41pm |
I see a lot of shopping carts attended by people. Not in stores, of course, but far from their homes.
Usually full of bottles on the way to the recycling center, or filled with discarded belongings scavenged by people like shopping cart guy.
This time, spotted a live one. An old man, perhaps 60, wearing a white shirt and jeans, wearing a cowboy hat. He looks like he might have actually worked on a farm; no affectation for this slightly stooped man.
He’s pushing a cart that actually appears to have grocery bags in it.
I can almost understand bringing home the groceries in a cart if you have to walk. It means you can probably bring it back. If it wants to be brought back.
Posted in Cart sightings
Ya know, I wonder about the shopping cart. What is its history? How did it come to be?
Another thing. Your figuring of carts, giving them identity, personality, animation, reminds me of Donna Haraway’s views on the world as a collective entity. I’ve only taken a look at one of her essay’s in depth, but the jist of what I get is this: the entity is made up of multiple actors–animate subjects (those things that some assume are sentient beings), inanimate subjects (those things that some assume to be living but not sentient), and inanimate nonsubjects (those things some think of as nonliving like stones and air). This entity is not simply organic, composed of many biological elements, but a collective that makes itself through interactions, such as technology or ‘uses’ of things upon each other; so, not just a person acting on ‘the world’ but ‘objects’ in the world also acting on biological elements. This view renders useless distinctions based on bodies, since, for example, a person’s interaction with a computer–or technology put in a body, or a body’s use of air–makes all those elements a part of one another, an entity without borders really.
Here’s a link to some of her stuff: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/
Interesting. I read her Cyborg Manifesto for one of my classes.