We made a world with permeable walls: the world of made things was a membrane that buffered us while continuing to exchange with the unmade world, a body around the body. As that made world became larger the walls became less penetrable, though there was less and less to shut out. Like the ideal, this world became an imitation of what was absent rather than the symbolic, symbiotic presence in relation to absence, as though inside were a substitute rather than a symbiont of outside. The crucial question about a wall is where it's breached.

So we live in a world that first existed inside the heads of others, a world built up through innumerable sustained acts of intentionality, a world where everything speaks not of nature and her processes but of its makers in their resistance to those processes. In a very real sense we can be described as living inside the heads of others, in an excess of interiority that obliterates our own relation to material origins, to biologies, to our bodies. (This is not to propose there is a state of being outside culture, but that the experiences culture mediates are increasingly of itself alone.) In some way, making was intended to override the givens of nature, to create a world; that world has itself become a given whose terms are more limited in their scope for imagination and act. The world is so thoroughly made it calls for no more making, but for breaching its walls and tracing its processes to their origins. Taking apart has become the primary metaphor and backward the most significant direction: the creative act becomes an unraveling, recouping the old rather than augmenting the new.

Rebecca Solnit, 'Landscapes of Emergency' in Ann Hamilton (University of Washington, 1992) p. 44