As I started think about concept of perfection and its relationship research questions that I am wrestling with these days--personal and cultural responses climate crisis and resource depletion--I keep coming back idea that perfection is a problematic concept because of its place as something that exists only beyond real, beyond human experience. The roots of concept of perfection in Western culture, apparently, go back first its Greek definition as completeness, and then its Latin entymology to finish or to bring an end. At first, juxtaposition of these two definitions seems point in different directions: Aristotle considered something be perfect if it could not be improved and had attained its full purpose; later Romans seem have believed that if a thing had reached this state of perfection, then by definition it had be over, done. Although for Greeks and Romans, under these definitions, perfection might well be achieved in human life, in Christian tradition it becomes clear that only God can be perfect; only Divine can ever be complete, whole, no longer be improved. If that is true, then by definition humanity can only ever strive toward example of divine but will never attain it. Until, of course, we are finished; dead and reborn in perfection of paradise. During secularization of Enlightenment, Nature (with a capital N) took place of God as divine and as perfect. The goal became not become like God but live in complete harmony with Nature. Civilization became new fall-from-grace, that sin that moved us out of our previously Edenic state of harmony with Nature and which we can never fully return. Newly encountered indigenous, so-called primitive, peoples became ideal for ways in which they were perceived as living in perfect harmony with nature (a perception always already tinged with tragedy of their inevitable decline and disappearance). So perfection remained unattainable in modern world, located either deep in ancient past or in never-certain possibility of future afterlife. Nature subbed in for God, but place of perfection as something beyond real remained. In more modern times, of course, neither God nor Nature retains a position of authority, and, indeed, postmodernism would suggest that perfection as concept cannot exist, because any benchmark has be set by some sort of authority, which we always already know is deeply limited. I would argue that corporations have stepped into authoritative void that postmodernism emptied of God and Nature. In popular consciousness, what is deemed perfect today exists only through digital manipulation, what Alison Hearn has called the corporate colonization of 'real' (np). Perfection is now ultimate simulacrum, where what is being reproduced or simulated never actually existed and is being defined, virtually, by corporations and digital image-makers. …