Tim Morton and I are currently forging together our respective positions. Where this will lead, I don’t know and I think Tim provides structural reasons as to why I can’t know in advance where it will lead. Right now I’m tentatively thinking of my own position as something akin to an eco-Marxism. Eco-Marxism wouldn’t simply be a Marxism that takes into account “the environment”, but rather would significantly expand the domain of Marxist thought. On the one hand, eco-Marxism would include nonhuman actors such as animal, mineral, and quantum beings within its scope. Put differently, the index wouldn’t simply be to human emancipation. I’m still thinking through this. On the other hand, drawing on Morton’s concept of the mesh, such a Marxism would focus on the imbrication of humans with all sorts of other media (in McLuhan’s sense) generating local manifestations that prevent us from strictly dividing the human from the nonhuman (think of Latour’s and Stengers’ networks or Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic assemblages). While this aspect of eco-Marxism would be thoroughly relational in character, it would emphasize that relations are always relations of exteriority. In other words, no entity can be reduced to its relations and the local manifestations it produces, but rather every entity harbors within it a withdrawn being in excess of its local manifestations (this approaches the diachronic dimension of Tim’s thought). This withdrawn dimension is the promise of forming collectives otherwise. Where an internalism of relations tends to lead to the conclusion that we’re stuck because all terms are caught in reciprocal relations with one another, the exteriority of relations gives us the resources for thinking change. Here the focus is not so much on critique, but rather, as Latour puts it, composition. That is, the work of politics and ethics is the composition of new collectives of humans and nonhumans opening the possibility of new ways of living. That’s just where my thought is leading. Tim might very well be on a different page.
At any rate, Tim has some great discussions of his mesh up over at youtube. I reproduce them here for those who are interested.
July 28, 2010 at 6:33 am
[…] Levels of Analysis Levi on Morton’s mesh and links to three youtube […]
July 28, 2010 at 1:08 pm
Superb, Tim! I’m not surprised to learn about virions running amok—those little tampering beasts. Until further notice virions are my dumping ground for every irking thing in my life. I guffawed at intellectual paradigms as humiliations of the human—finally a sensible explanation for the resistance to acknowledging new ones. As for Darwin’s “understatement of the millennium.” It’s why we revere him, isn’t it—his understatements waiting to be called out? There’s a certain caring there, and generosity to his readers, almost ideally parental, a transfer of glory to the detective. Just regard the subtle change in expression in Tim’s face at that moment, a certain pride in being human, alive and thinking; Darwin extends that from the grave and I guess what i mean by parental is that we can all be brothers and sisters in relation to those discoveries. It’s so beautiful. Speaking of…sorry, Tim, Part 2, 5:50 does not erase 5:48—the most oblique angle of your head, otherwise known as the soft-spot. Sexy! Quoting Bohm again, “Movement gives shape to all forms.”
July 28, 2010 at 5:48 pm
[…] Newly arrived OOO champion Tim Morton has been having an interesting back-and-forth with Levi, HERE. Posted by doctorzamalek Filed in Uncategorized Leave a Comment […]
July 28, 2010 at 7:40 pm
[…] thought I write a quick one, weighing in on Levi’s post regarding Tim Morton’s notion of The Mesh, (heres what I believe is the transcript of that […]
July 29, 2010 at 10:59 pm
[…] By contrast, the diachrony that Morton emphasizes already departs substantially from Saussurean and even Derridean diachrony/deferral. Where Saussurean diachrony is strictly guided by synchrony, Darwinian diachrony […]
July 31, 2010 at 3:47 pm
[…] It is for this reason that questions of how to produce resonance is so crucial to political activism. The question of how to produce resonance is, in its turn, the question of how to produce or generate common places. Here, however, it is necessary to remember that because objects are withdrawn or operationally closed, it is impossible for one object to steer another. The formation of a common place does not steer or control other systems, but creates a space in which one object takes on the capacity to perturb another. In other words, common places are sites where structural coupling among distinct objects takes place. Structural coupling refers to a repetitive relation where one system or object begins to draw on another for perturbation. This relation is depicted in Maturana and Varela’s diagram to the right, and is what Morton refers to as interdependence. […]