Jon Lindblom on DeLanda

I just want to make sure everyone interested was in the know about Jon’s latest post over at Intensive Thinking which includes a transcript of a brief presentation he did about the neo-materialist philosophy of Manuel DeLanda. I couldn’t find a damn thing I disagreed with in his presentation (and I tried).

Below are some highlights, but for Shiva’s sake go read it for yourself:

“[H]ow should we explain the workings of a complex and mind-independent reality? In other words, the first question which any speculative realist thinker has to pose is: what is it that gives reality structure once we have removed the human/world-correlate, and dogmatism, from the centre stage? It’s here that DeLanda introduces his neo-materialism, which, as the name implies, is different from Marxist materialism, in that it ditches the dialectic simply as a transcendental illusion, and also argues that matter not only exists independently of our minds, but also has the capacity to express itself independently of our minds. So this is how he manages to circumvent the deadlock between idealism and naive realism, that is, by understanding matter as morphogenetically charged, or synthetically potent, with autonomous self-differentiating capacities.” ?” [source]

I’m intrigued by Jon’s use of the word potency throughout his post, and hope this might somehow 'catch on', resulting in some serious thinking about what that term has to offer speculative ontography.

“[E]ven if it is true that scientific theories can never give us a complete account of the real that doesn’t mean that they are completely wrong, or inadequate to draw ontological consequences from, as the speculative realist philosopher Ray Brassier has pointed out in response to similar criticisms: ‘The fact that our best current science will probably turn out be only partly true does not license the conclusion that it is all wrong and that it has no authority whatsoever’.” [source]

Check it out: Here