Abram is a unique and compelling figure; a beautiful writer, environmental philosopher, and advocate for the more-than-human world who also brings his unlikely career as a sleight-of-hand magician to bear on his work. The core argument of his now-canonical, essentially unclassifiable work is that the sense-making apparatus that humans evolved to read the traces of other creatures and phenomena in the world was profoundly redirected through the introduction of written language. In Abrams’ estimation, this transformation is something that contemporary society must use with awareness to reckon with a world-threatening ecological crisis. It’s a well-needed warning, argued with intricacy—one that sounds even more salient nearly 25 years after its first publication.
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.