Speculative Realism Does Not Exist

Critical Animal has posed a series of questions to the so-called “Speculative Realists”. I’ll take a stab at trying to respond to some of them.

(1) For an intellectual movement that has such a strong internet presence, why do you all have such an unhelpful wikipedia entry?

No doubt this has to do with those who are writing the wiki entries. It would be rather self-indulgent to write one’s own wiki entry.

(2) What are the major different currents of speculative realism? I just would not have thought to combine many of you together as part of a philosophical movement (school? gathering?). So, what holds you all together as an idea? What are the major different currents?

It seems to me that the major currents among the speculative realists are those of reductive materialism (Brassier), materialism (Meillassoux), object-oriented ontology (Harman, Latour, and myself), perhaps variants of vitalism (Grant?), Deleuzian thought (DeLanda, myself), and many other variants aside. The speculative realists are more united by what they oppose, than by the philosophical claims they share in common. In short, all of the SR positions share the thesis that the human and human phenomena have no special place within being and are opposed to the thesis that we must start with an analysis of something pertaining to the human (mind, history, language, power, signs, etc.) to properly pose questions of ontology. For my own part (and I think Harman and Latour would agree with me here), this does not entail that these things are unworthy of study or should be dismissed, only that everything else shouldn’t be subordinated to them. Moreover, Latour, Deleuze, and myself all hold that we cannot study the social in abstraction but that nonhuman objects or actors are key components of the social that make their own contributions and which aren’t simply vehicles for signs or power. Irreductions is really good on this point. Apart from that, there are pretty marked differences among the various speculative realists. For example, Brassier seems to advocate a reductive materialism where only things like subatomic particles and neurons are real, whereas Harman and myself are more pluralist, counting anything from the atom to the character of Harry Potter as being real. In other words “Speculative Realism” does not exist.

Each one of these positions develops a positive ontology, very different from the others. If things continue this way– and there seems to be every likelihood it will given the rise of Deleuze and Guattari, Badiou, and Meillassoux in theory circles –”speculative realism” will very quickly shift from debates with correlationists to debates among one another in years to come. In other words, it seems like the day of a particular kind of philosophy is passing very quickly. These debates are already beginning. Thus, for example, we see Hallward critiquing both Deleuze and Badiou. We see Harman critiquing DeLanda, Latour, and Grant. We see Brassier critiquing Deleuze, Badiou, and Meillassoux. All of these critiques are productive, but nonetheless they do mark real differences.

(3) I know not all of you have a beef with Foucault, but I have seen several vaguely dismissive comments from the object-oriented types about Foucault. So, what is the matter with Foucault?

I can only speak for myself with respect to Foucault. On the one hand, I have a deep admiration for Foucault. On the other hand, I find Foucault problematic for two reasons: First, I see Foucault, despite his avowed anti-humanism, as a variant of correlationism. All beings of the world are filtered through discursive formations and power structures, enjoying no autonomy or being of their own. On the other hand, following Latour, Foucault treats power and discursive formations as explanatory principles, in much the same way that a sociologist might appeal to “society” or “social forces” to explain some phenomenon. However, society, power, and discursive structures explain nothing, rather they are what is to be explained. In other words, the object-oriented philosopher holds that we must examine how these things come to be assembled, put together, etc through networks of objects of actors. Objects or actors are not explained by reference to power, discursivity, and social forces, but rather the reverse: power, discursivity, and social forces are explained through objects or actors. Foucault gets it backwards. With that said, there is nothing to prevent an object-oriented approach to Foucault’s thought that surmounts this problem. However, it’s worth noting that the way Foucault articulates his theory and his actual theoretical practice differ markedly. In his theoretical articulation it’s all power and discursive regimes. In his practice, by contrast, we see him discussing all sorts of assemblages that include human and nonhuman actors. This is what renders a Foucaultian object-oriented philosophy possible. I should also add that one of the things I find deeply attractive about OOP is that it allows you to retain a number of the key discoveries of the correlationists– in modified form, of course –without falling into the anti-realist camp.

read on!

 

The Speculative Turn

I am extremely excited to see that Re.Press has announced the edited collection Nick, Graham, and I are putting together. Contributors will include Ray Brassier , Nathan Brown, Levi R Bryant, Gabriel Catren, Manuel DeLanda, Iain Hamilton Grant, Martin Hägglund, Peter Hallward, Graham Harman, Adrian Johnston, Francois Laruelle, Bruno Latour, Quentin Meillassoux, Reze Negarestani, Nicole Pepperell, John Protevi, Nick Srnicek, Isabelle Stengers, Alberto Toscano, and Slavoj Žižek.

I conceived the collection one drunken night as I was cooking dinner, full of warm and euphoric sensations from the chardonnay I was drinking (yeah I know, lame, but for some reason chardonnay makes me very euphoric, sentimental, expansive, affectionate, and happy whenever I drink it), and flush with excitement from reading Meillassoux’s After Finitude and from encountering Graham’s work, much to my embarrassment, for the first time. Prior to that, I only knew of Graham as the guy from DePaul (Loyola’s Continental rival) who had published a book fresh out of grad school and who was wearing a fidora in his books cover picture, i.e., I encountered him as an object of my envy and ressentiment. The original title of the collection was to be Post-Continental Realisms, but that title quickly got shot down– rightfully –by Bruno who observed that we have far too many “posts” in philosophy. “Let’s just do philosophy, eh?” At any rate, with the project fresh in my mind and wine diminishing my judgment, I immediately contacted Nick Srnicek, whose work I admire tremendously, who knows far more about the speculative realists than I ever will, and who I also owed for so generously citing me in his thesis.

Nick and I set about contacting the “big four” (Brassier, Grant, Harman, and Meillassoux), as well as others doing important work with a realist orientation (Stengers, DeLanda, Johnston, Hallward, Badiou, Protevi, Hagglund, Pepperell, etc). We were shocked and overwhelmed by the enthusiasm with which our proposal was met. Along the way we struck up a friendship with Harman and he did so much work promoting the collection that there was no way we couldn’t make him an editor. Graham is a work-horse, filled with enthusiasm for everything he does, and a mover and shaker. I really don’t know where he gets the time to do all that he does while also doing such creative and original philosophy.

As I sit here today, not even a year later, watching the articles begin to roll in, I am amazed by how much this project has changed my own thought process and philosophical orientation. One of the things I really like about this collection is that it is a work written by moles and being published by moles. Here I am not using the term “mole” in the sense proposed by Jon Cogburn, but rather in the sense of the old spy movies as someone who infiltrates a foreign organization and undermines it from within. On the one hand, nearly all of the contributors to this collection are moles in the sense that they are on the fringes of mainstream Continental philosophy, somewhat excluded from academia and traditional Continental scholarship. What made this strange alliance of moles possible– as moles are generally solitary creatures –was the internet, which allowed for networks of burrows to be formed, creating the possibility of strange cross-fertilizations of ideas and philosophical orientations that are otherwise so disparate. Although moles are generally peaceful creatures, content to burrow and feast on the grubs and delectable roots they find, nomadic mole armies are fearsome forces, despite their myopia. Indeed, their myopia or devotion to burrowing lines of flight are their strength.

On the other hand, Re.Press is a mole press, publishing the work of authors and thinkers that otherwise would have a great deal of difficulty getting their work published by more mainstream Continental presses, due to the manner in which these works tend not to be organized around commentary on a particular thinker. In this respect, the name “Re.Press” is a double entendre, capturing Freud’s dictum that repression is always accompanied by the return of the repressed.

However, if Re.Press is a mole press, then this is because through open access publishing that makes its texts available to the general public online, it allows for networks of burrows to be formed, alliances to be forged, that would otherwise be significantly restricted by exclusive paper publishing. Like the scene in Fight Club where Ed Norton’s character beats himself up, the voice-over remarking that something has been growing around and behind his boss that couldn’t be seen, open access publishing as well as blogs allow for mole collectives to be formed that skirt the established hierarchies of the academies and the morphogenetic role they play in defining the canon. If you read Peter Gay’s biography of Freud you discover that a mere handful of psychoanalytic theorists managed to transform the world through weekly meetings in Freud’s living room over coffee. The internet intensifies the formation of such networked assemblages and alliances. Moreover, it is high time that we Continentalists shoot back at ridiculously priced presses like Continuum and Palgrave that both inhibit the propagation of thought, hurt academic careers by keeping the work of emerging authors in obscurity due to the price of their texts, and that promote a sort of implicit elitism by restricting readership to those that can either afford the texts or who have access to a good library. And, of course, there are all the ecological issues behind paper publishing as well.

As far as my own contribution to this project goes, I’d like to express my great thanks to Jon Cogburn, Nick Srnicek, Reza Negarestani, John Protevi, and Nathan Gale for the exceedingly helfpul comments they gave me on my article “The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Philosophy”. While not shirking on critical comments, all of you have been extremely encouraging and helped me to better develop my own vague intuitions. I owe all of you.

 

Darwin & Philosophy

Somewhere or other, Deleuze remarks that Darwin effects a Copernican revolution for thought. Yet in many respects, it seems that this revolution has gone almost completely unremarked in philosophy. In short, this revolution has scarcely been registered by philosophy. Here it is important to be precise. The claim that Darwin effected a Copernican revolution in thought does not refer to his magnificent contributions to biology. Nor is the suggestion that philosophy should become “Darwinistic”, reducing philosophical questions to questions of biology.

Rather, Darwin’s revolution is far more general and abstract. Setting aside his theory of biological speciation, Darwin’s contribution to philosophy resides in his understanding of difference. It could be said that Darwin’s motto is that individual difference makes the difference. Where, prior to Darwin, there was a sharp gulf separating difference inhabiting the individual and species-difference, Darwin shows how individual difference is productive of species-difference. In the former scheme, the individual and the species were understood as two distinct entities, with the species functioning as an ideal norm defining individuals, an essence, distinct and existing in its own right, and individuals being measured in terms of how closely they approach this ideal form.

read on!

 

Tentative Book Title

For the next book I had been toying with the title Being and Difference: An Essay in Object-Oriented Ontology. However, I think this title suffers from three major flaws. First, it’s repetitive with respect to the title of my first book. Second, it’s bland. And third, it’s pompous! Right now I’m toying with the idea of entitling it The Democracy of Objects: Substance, Essence, and Existents. The main part of the title is, of course, indebted to Latour. Latour’s work is thoroughly pervaded by a democracy of objects insofar as all actors (his generic term for objects) are on equal footing, each interacting with and vying with all the others.

Somewhere or other– I believe in The Sublime Object of Ideology –Zizek remarks that metaphysics (in the pejorative sense) consists in elevating a part to the ground of the whole. Thus, for example, certain versions of Marxist thought would remain metaphysical in this pejorative sense in that economics serves as the ground of all other things. Economics becomes that ground to which all other things must be traced. In a manner similar to Anglo-American thought, Continental philosophy since Kant has pitched itself as a critique and overcoming of metaphysics. However, if metaphysics is thematized in terms of Zizek’s definition (really drawn from Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics vis a vis his history of being), then it could be said that Continental thought has been hyper-metaphysical since Kant. In Kant we get the reduction of being to mind, in the sense that mind comes to function as the ground of all phenomena. We get variations of this thesis in Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, etc. The other option, by contrast, has been to treat language as the ground of all other phenomena. Thus in thinkers like Lacan, Derrida, Lyotard, and Gadamer, language becomes the part that grounds and determines everything else. In defending a democracy of being, onticology seeks to escape this kind of metaphysics so as to infinitely open up the domain of ontological inquiry and speculation. Where traditional metaphysics from Plato to Derrida treats one kind of being as the ground of all other beings, onticology defends a pluralism of objects, where “pluralism” is not simply to be understood as a plurality of objects belonging to the same kind (material objects, for example), but a pluralism of kinds of objects without one type of object serving as the ground of all others.

If there has been a great merit to object-oriented ontology, I think it is twofold: First, in my view, object-oriented ontology is the first post-non-philosophical philosophy. Laruelle argues that the central gesture of any and all philosophy is to divide the world into a factum and datum, a transcendental and a phenomenon, such that philosophy is perpetually caught in a vicious circle where it assumes the very thing it seeks to account for. In other words, philosophy, according to Laruelle, is auto-positing, and, for this reason, is unable to reach the real. By contrast, non-philosophy begins from the real according to Laruelle. From the standpoint of object-oriented ontology, non-philosophy remains too idealist in its tenor, and therefore all too metaphysical in its assumptions. Object-oriented ontology inscribes this very translation of the real into objects themselves, pluralizing it and thereby rendering it ubiquitous, rather than the exclusive domain of philosophy. In this way it is able to formulate a post-non-philosophical philosophy. Likewise, as is amply evident from Harman’s work, object-oriented philosophy is among our first post-ontotheological metaphysics. This is an accomplishment of his own of which Harman himself seems to be unaware in his own work. Hitherto critiques of ontotheology or philosophies of presence have proceeded negatively, showing how human access is necessarily characterized by finitude or limitation, such that presence always already presupposes absence as both its condition of possibility and impossibility. This critique always proceeds by reference to some human phenomenon, whether that phenomenon be the activity of presencing through Dasein, the role of differance in language, the traces of history, etc. Among Harman’s great achievements is a genuine metaphysics, in the non-pejorative sense –in which the primacy of presence is overcome at the level of being itself, regardless of whether humans exist. Zizek famously remarked that we shall be healed by the very spear that smote us or that the wound itself is the solution. Harman’s metaphysics is thoroughly Zizekian in this sense. Rather than seeing the impossibility of presence as the impossibility of metaphysics, he discerns it as the very condition of metaphysics… Of a metaphysics not shackled to the human or the primacy of questions of access. Any Continental realism must meet these requirement, and to do so it must be a democracy of objects, rather than a metaphysics in the pejorative sense of reducing all other beings to one ground or privileged object from which all others issue.

At any rate, I’m rambling now. Any thoughts on the title?

 

Networks, Alliances, and Mediators

For the last couple of years I have increasingly become hostile to structural models of the social. The reason for this is not that I do not think that the concept of structure doesn’t often present highly useful and illuminating models of social relations. Like any formalization, a model allows us to discern patterns and relations that are not immediately evident from the standpoint of the buzzing confusion of the empirical world, and to discern possibilities of combination that would otherwise be impossible to conceive. Problems with the concept of structure arise, however, from two sources: 1) as employed in Continental social and political theory, the concept of structure all too often renders too much invisible, leading us to ignore the work of engineering or public works through which social networks are organized, maintained, and reproduced. As a result, we end up asking the wrong sorts of strategic questions in our political theorizations. When we look at a mathematical category, for example– a diagram that is not remarkably different from a structure –we are dazzled by the elegance and the simplicity of the model, the manner in which it brings a sort of clarity to the world, forgetting that the elements related by these arrows require painstaking processes through which they are brought together.

2) When we ontologize structures, treating models as realities rather than descriptions of realities, we are led to ask all sorts of misguided questions. Suddenly it is the map that does all our explanatory work, rather than the map functioning as the tracing of a set of fuzzy patterned interactions that themselves require explanation. This is always the problem when we appeal to “social factors” to explain some phenomena. We treat the very thing to be explained as what does the explaining, making appeals not unlike appeals to Zeus to explain lightening. But worse yet, when we ignore how patterns, relations, and ongoing forms of organizations are formed, our social explanations lead to a sort of theoretical pessimism as a structure or a network of power takes on the appearance of an iron law of necessity from which escape is impossible. The crystalline beauty of a diagram or a structure takes on the appearance of a pre-established harmony. However, what we should aim for is not a pre-established harmony, but, as Latour puts it in Irreductions, a post-established harmony. The real mystery is not how it is possible to produce change, but rather how certain networks manage to hold together at all.

read on!

 

Lacanian Psychoanalysis Through the Lens of Onticology

I am very tired this morning as I stayed up far too late watching first season episodes of Dexter and had to get up very early this morning to get blood work done, so hopefully I make some sense in these remarks. For some time now I’ve pondered the issue of what precisely accounts for the efficacy of psychoanalytic treatment. In many instances I have no doubt that Lacanian psychoanalysis does produce substantial transformations in symptoms and, in a closely related vein, the manner in which a person relates to and experiences others. This was certainly true in my own case, and, I believe, in the case of a number of patients I worked with back when I was still practicing.

Setting aside the aim of analysis as traversing the fantasy and identifying with the symptom, the core Lacanian thesis is that the unconscious is structured like a language. Under this model, the symptom, understood from one angle, is a coagulation of unconscious language that speaks, as it were, that which has fallen underneath the bar of repression. As both Freud and Lacan liked to say, there is no repression without a return of the repressed. What is repressed are therefore signifiers. The symptom is a return of those signifiers in disguised form. In the Rome Discourse Lacan remarks that all speech is addressed to someone. Thus the symptom can be seen as a disguised speech to someone.

My favorite example of this from my own analysis comes from my early teaching experience. At Loyola we still used chalk. When I first began teaching I found myself constantly breaking chalk. This little tick became very noticeable, such that not only was I deeply embarrassed by it, but my students began to chuckle over it and even gave me a chalk guard with a declaration from the citizens of “Chalkville” asking that I clothe their citizens in this fine suit of armor so as to put an end to my carnage. While touched by this little gesture, I was also very bothered by the breaking of the chalk. I remember obsessively talking about it one day in analysis, words flying out of my mouth a mile a minute. At one point I said something like “I don’t know what my problem is, I just seem to put too much pressure on the chalk at the board.” My analyst flatly intoned something like “pressure at the board” and I responded with something like “yeah that’s right, too much pressure on the board.” I thought nothing of it at the time and continued rambling. I didn’t notice until a couple weeks later that I had stopped breaking chalk after that session. The breaking of the chalk was a sort of micro-symptom and a rather minor one at that, though certainly linked in with my global or structuring symptom. I encountered the breaking of the chalk as a problem of technique, a mechanical problem, an inability I have to modulate the amount of pressure I put on the chalk. What my analyst did with his monotonic phrase was transform this bungled action into a condensation or a bit of speech, situating it not as a problem of physics, but as a way of speaking the pressure and anxiety I was experiencing at the board. Perhaps this symptom was even a message to the other situating myself as inept, as bungled, as incompetent, so that I could prop up the Other as complete (a role I had played with respect to my father as a child). The point is that in being articulated, the symptom disappeared. It no longer had to manifest itself in my flesh and activity because it had now been articulated.

read on!

 

Endo-Relational Structure, Attractors, and Phase Spaces

It looks like I’m writing a lot of posts responding to others today, but I can’t express how helpful these comments are in assisting me in the development of my own thoughts. In response to my last post, NrG writes:

First, I would love to read something other than Lacan for our groups. And second, I would enjoy it even more if it were Graham’s new book! So, to answer your question, I’m definitely on board.

Now, to my (seemingly unending series of) questions. When you comment that:

“Rather, the body is an endo-relational unity anterior to whatever matter might compose it, wherein the elements related interdepend on one another through time.”

Could you possibly describe the differences between a sum, a composition, and a unity? As I see it, there seems to be more to a composition than a simple sum, but in what way(s) does a unity differ from either or both?

Also, I am struck by the fact that there seems to be something “anterior” to the object-whole. I’m not disagreeing with you, per se, but am intrigued by this notion that before multiple objects become a whole, there seems to be a preset or pre-constructed form by which the objects (eventually, but not always) come to take.

My favorite example is the two garages, one with a pile of parts and the other with a similar pile but fully constructed into a working motorcycle. Now, you’re right; for if the whole was merely the sum of its parts, then the pile would be the same object as the working motorcycle. However, there is something quite drastically different between the two. It is only because the parts are composed in such and such a way that the working motorcycle comes to be. Parts can be replaced, but only if the new parts maintain the same function in the composition. (Another example would be that given the sentence, “Bob wrote a paper.” I could easily replace the word Bob with the pronoun he, with little to no change in the sentence’s meaning – “He wrote a paper.” Yet, the more complex the sentence/object, the harder it is to make such replacements.)

What most fascinates me about form, then, is that it seems to exist as part of the object-whole, but is not essentially a proper part in the sense that it, itself, cannot be taken as an independent object. For, what object is “the body”, or “the motorcycle” minus all of their respective parts?

First things first: I am absolutely stoked at the prospect of readings Harman’s Prince of Networks for reading group. In my view it is his finest work to date, though this might just be a function of my abiding affection for Latour. It would be terrific to start sooner rather than later, i.e., over the Summer. Maybe we could send something out to the group list this week with the proposal and see when folks are available.

Now onto more metaphysical issues. I think NrG’s intuitions concerning the difference between sums and compositions are similar to my own. I take it that a sum is a collection in which the parts do not depend on one another. A sum can thus be thought as a simple set. The elements of a set have no relations of dependency with respect to one another defined merely by membership in the set. Proof of this can be seen in the fact that we are authorized to take the sub-multiple of any set without that multiple being changed in any way as a result of its subtraction from the set. For this reason I’m inclined to say that sets aren’t objects. I think Badiou comes to realize this himself in the trajectory of his thought from Being and Event to Logics of Worlds. If he comes to the conclusion that we require category theory to think objects and worlds, then this seems to be because he recognizes that you don’t get an object or a world out of a mere set extensionally defined. I differ from Badiou on this point in rejecting the thesis that objects are necessarily indexed to a world and a transcendental, and in my distinction between endo- and exo-relations. If I reject Badiou’s thesis that objects are necessarily indexed to a world, then this is because I am committed to the independent substantivity of objects. I confess that I might be unfair to Badiou on this point as Badiou does argue that objects can move from world to world while remaining the same object in Logics of Worlds.

read on!

 

Nested Objects

In response to my post on endo- and exo-relations, my friend NrG writes:

But how can such a distinction (between endo- and exo-relations) be at all possible, since even if we believe to be discussing the endo-relation of one object, aren’t we at the same time also talking about the exo-relation of other objects? So for example, when we discuss our circulatory system in the vacuum of space, true, we are discussing an endo-relation with regards to our body. However, we are discussing an exo-relation with regards to our blood cells.

It seems, then, that any discussion of endo-/exo-, or part/whole relations needs to maintain the thesis that to change one side of the binary is to also change the other side. Therefore, to throw our bodies into space (a purely exo-relation with regards to our bodies) means that our endo-relations will also have to change. For the opposite is also true. If we contract a disease that produces massive boils on our skin, or that leads to the loss of use of an appendage, we could say that our endo-relations caused our exo-relations to change – and not just physically. People might stay away from us, or we may not be able to move around our physical environment as easily as before, therefore limiting our encounters with other objects.

I guess in a way, what I’m getting at is, who’s to say that an object’s endo-relations have to compose an objects exo-relation? Why not the opposite, as well? Can multiple objects’ exo-relations eventually create another object’s endo-relations? And, is it wrong for me to think of endo-relations as part-relations and exo-relations as whole-relations?

I think that this is a really fascinating series of questions and that it gets at the core of one of the central theses of Object-Oriented Ontology. Graham Harman does an excellent job addressing these sorts of issues in his own work. Tim, Adam, and I have been talking about reading Harman’s Prince of Networks for reading group later this Summer or in the Fall. Hopefully NrG will enthusiastically agree as well. At any rate, as developed in the magnificent third chapter of Tool-Being, two of Harman’s central claims are that objects withdraw from all of their relations as analyzed by Heidegger with his notion of veiling, and that objects are multiples of other objects. With respect to the first thesis, the idea is that when one object relates to another the relation never exhausts the being of the other object. In other words, there is something of the volcanic core of objects that always exceeds any relation that it enters into, such that the substantivity of the grasped object is never exhausted in being grasped.

read on!

 

Endo-Relations, Exo-Relations, and Substance

In a terrific response to my post on exo-relations, Caemeron writes:

I wonder if people are scared to comment on this? The topic here does get pretty obscure and daunting, but I would like you to say more.

I remain unconvinced by your claim that there are objects that aren’t related to any other object.

To begin, I’ll take your example of yourself in relation to planet earth. Isn’t planet earth the way it is because of its gravitational relations with the rest of the solar system, and the solar system with the galaxy and so on?

Secondly, what is your take on “the butterfly effect”, or the idea that miniscule events on the other side of the world can create large impacts through a serial progression? To the point, perhaps: by relation do you mean only direct relation?

you say:

This is one reason that we are able to claim that two objects can be spatially unrelated. If enough time has not elapsed for light to travel to the other object, then there is no gravitational relation between these objects.

Could we not add the word ‘yet’ to the end of this? doesn’t that give us a temporal relation?

Insofar as you want to say that objects create spatiotemporal relations rather than vice versa, I’m with you, but I simply find the notion of an object which is unrelated to anything else to be unthinkable (wouldn’t thinking about it place it into a relation?) And, if it is thinkable through Gaussian manifolds, which I know woefully little about, I don’t see how that might justify us in claiming that there actually are such objects (to throw your criticism of Badiou back at you)

‘Relation’ seems to me to be a very broad term. A number like 47 may not be in space or time, but is certainly related to many things conceptually, metonymically, mathematically, etc. It seems to me that we can even conceive of non-relation as a form of relation.

Is your claim that 1) an object is not necessarily related to every other object or 2) there are objects which are not related to any other object?

I think Caemeron here raises a number of points that are worth briefly expanding upon and clarifying. First, my thesis is not that objects are unrelated to anything else or that there are objects that are unrelated to anything else. Like Caemeron, I hold that objects maintain a variety of exo-relations with other objects. My body, for example, has the shape, height, and consistency it possesses because of the exo-relations it has with other objects like the planet earth, the molecules presiding over air pressure etc. Consequently, there are a number of qualities belonging to my body that would not exist as they do without exo-relations or relations to other objects.

read on!

 

Love Letters

There is something deeply disgusting in the publication of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s love letters. There is something loathsome in the mockery of these love letters. Yes, Sanford is guilty of negligence and dereliction of duty with respect to his responsibilities as Governor. Yes, it is very likely that Sanford stole from the citizens to South Carolina to fund his trips to Argentina. Yes, Sanford is a cynical hypocrite who used the mantra of “family values” to manipulate stupid conservative values based voters to support him and who participated in legislation designed to oppress women and LBGT folk in the name of “family values” (the show True Blood has the proper take on what these conservative religious groups are really about).

Despite all this, there’s absolutely no reason to publish these letters and the mockery of these letters is even worse. Last night I watched with thorough disgust as the gasbag Keith Olbermann adopted a mocking voice and read the letters to Bridges of Madison County music. Him and his guest ridiculed the style of the letters, their inept references, and various grammatical and spelling errors of the letters. However, in reading these letters it is clear that something of deep significance had happened in his encounter with this woman and that he had, no matter how poorly expressed, genuine tenderness for her. Whatever else Sanford should be condemned for– and he really should step down or be impeached –he should not be condemned for love. Indeed, if anything redeems Sanford to some degree, it’s these letters. Indeed, given his actions over the last few days– his bizarre disappearance without notifying any of his staff –it’s pretty clear that at some level he was trying to blow up his life.

read on!