Meanwhile, Levi Bryant has a great post up on reading Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura ('On the Nature of Things'). My favorite passage in this post (one which I entirely agree with) is his last:
With Lucretius, by contrast, we get nature as absolute interactive immanence where whatever comes to be is but one of the possibilities of nature. Within this nature there is no outside or other (there is no culture, for example, that is something “other” than nature), but rather there is just The Wild. Culture too is a part or manifestation of the wilderness. One cannot travel to the wilderness or wild because wherever one is they are already in the wild or wilderness. Our building of houses is no more unnatural than beavers building damns. And this conception of nature, without teleology or divinely decreed ought is the condition and mark of any genuinely emancipatory project.
Wherever you go, there you, as nature, are. The wilderness of being is immanent to itself – dynamically so. Go read the rest of Levi’s post here.
Posts
6 comments:
welcome back to the machine, i enjoyed the related connolly lecture you had up a while ago and esp. near the very end where he says that he is focused more on developing a capacity/cultivation of an ethos of caring vs focusing on certain peak moments of great intensity and or an ethos of derivation,
and a recognition of post-dialectic deep/real contingency and multiplicities.
hope to find a cheap used copy someday of the book.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMQurDWeeN0
-dmf
@Dirk -thanks sir. I'm still trying to recover what was lost in "the great crash of 2011" as it is know at my house. My operating system went loco and now I say goodbye to PCs for good. Hello Apple.
As for Connolly, well, i find his work truly stimulating. His latest is fantastic, although, from what I can tell you are not as big a proponent of granting 'agency' to non-humans as Latour, Bennett, Connolly and I am. Regardless, there's a tone to his 'playful' explorations that speaks to me of deeper truths re: impermanence and connection I think gets lost in discourses like OOO.
Despite my view that the OOO/Process camps are unnecessarily dichotomized, if i was forced to choose (which i never would be) i'll take becoming over being every time...
it depends I'm all for seeing the world of objects as having their own physical capacities but I think that they are truly alien and have nothing like interests, hell I don't even think that most of the objects/processes that make up our own bodies, even at the level of our kluged non-conceptual neurofunctions have interests/intents, so if Shaviro is right that the divide is around "mindedness" than I'm in the non camp.
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/the-sorcerers-apprentice/
ps one of the ironies of flat ontologies seems to be seeing much more systematic stability/coherence in the social/human realms than there is. there is a real need here for lifting one's head from the page and paying attention, more case studies, more mangling in our practices, we must allow actual differences a chance to offer us some resistance and not smooth all of the edges away for some desired logical coherence.
There’s a lot to respond here so I’ll try my best and take it in chunks:
DIRK: it depends I'm all for seeing the world of objects as having their own physical capacities but I think that they are truly alien and have nothing like interests, hell I don't even think that most of the objects/processes that make up our own bodies, even at the level of our kluged non-conceptual neurofunctions have interests/intents...
MICHAEL: That is the crucial issue. I think we can resolve some of the hesitation about the agency of objects by first of all relaxing (or stretching) what we mean by agency and intentionality.
For example, we could ask, “does a machete have intentions?” Of course not. A machete does not have the requisite capacities (plasticity and recursivity) to expressively ‘want’ or be interested in other objects. So in a traditional sense a machete is not a will-full entity. However, a machete does have certain onto-specific (irreducible) properties which help define its intrinsic boundaries and expressible capacities. These “physical capacities”, as you call them, are affective and make differences in the world in terms of where they came from, how other entities or assemblages encounter them (passively or actively), and the relations they enter into. That is to say, a machete brings with it material-affective capacities (to cut to threaten, etc.) or substantiality – what I call an assemblage’s potency - unique to its individual existence. This, I think, is what is meant when theorists refer to a thing’s “agency” (e.g., Bennett’s “thing-power”). A machete’s potent capacities are a kind of rudimentary agency.
Now this is where it can get interesting, because no object/assemblage is an island. Every actually existing entity is implicated (to varying degrees) in relations with a multiplicity of processes, flows, networks and objects which embody basic forms of “agency” or potency in their own right. So what we get, at a fundamental level, is a series of inter-acting and intra-acting potencies coalescing into different contextual assemblages (or what Latour calls compositions) and ecologies expressing differential degrees of affective force, distributed agency and formative capacities. These matrices (alliances, complexes, societies, ecologies, situations, contexts, etc., etc.,) of extensive properties operate on all scales of reality, and forming various.
So, for me, it’s not a matter of, say, my spleen having “intentions” all its own, but about my spleen expressing partially “withdrawn” capacities and properties (“agency”) irreducible to (but simultaneously enmeshed within) its functioning in my body. Likewise for machetes. Machetes have a potent materiality specific to their actual existence irreducible to the relations they enter into.
Moreover, without going too far into here, what fascinates me is how objects/complexes/processual-units/matrices enter into “alliances” or networks with other complexes to form distributed, novel and emergent assemblages with irreducible capacities and properties specific to those alliances. Each object-matrix contributes their own agentic potency (material and expressive capacities) towards that alliance, thus creating novel material-energetic dynamics and amplifications of affective force hitherto not possible. No virtuality needed; only relatively individuated matrices of affective potency colliding and catalyzing unique combinations and assemblies of capacity.
Human agency and cognition is a great example of this: without the affordances of interobjective support, extended symbolic networks, social communication, group affective resonance, etc., humans would have very rudimentary “agency” with relatively unrefined cognitive capacities. It is because we are nurtured and connected beings perpetually implicated in ecologies with potent affordances that we can amplify our abilities and acquire relevant instantiated skills, historical understandings and communal participations. (see the growing 4EA paradigm for details).
To provide one last morbid example, we need only refer to how the irreducible (proto)agency” or potency of machetes combined with the agency or potency of humans, combined with the diminished potency of depleted ecological “resources” combined to generate a matrix/situation or “regime of attraction” (Levi Bryant) where 800,000 people were murdered in Rwanda in 1994. Without the affective potency of machetes or the weakened potencies of humans, or the scarce potencies of Rwandan subsistence conditions genocide may not have actually occurred. And without an acknowledgement of the irreducible “agencies” of all these elements we can’t truly understand what and how it happened, and how to decrease the possibility of it ever happening again.
DIRK: so if Shaviro is right that the divide is around "mindedness" than I'm in the non camp.
MICHAEL: I’m not sure I share Steven’s assessment here however. I don’t think it’s about “mindedness” at all, but about potency, and perhaps how hominid mental capacities (“mind”) are ‘simply’ complex, onto-specfic modes of affective force inherent to materiality as such. So, in this sense, a machete expresses one certain kind of physical capacity (potency) and a human another. “Mindedness” is an onto-specific potency particular to animal entities/assemblages, while potency in general (that is, capacities to affect and be affected) is inherent to actuality itself.
DIRK: one of the ironies of flat ontologies seems to be seeing much more systematic stability/coherence in the social/human realms than there is. there is a real need here for lifting one's head from the page and paying attention, more case studies, more mangling in our practices, we must allow actual differences a chance to offer us some resistance and not smooth all of the edges away for some desired logical coherence.
MICHAEL: Mangles, indeed. But perhaps we don’t need to conceive of either difference or fundamental unity . Perhaps in a dynamic, substantial and emerging reality (a world of becoming and being) what we need in a way to conceive of both simultaneously?
Post a Comment