In response to my last post, Wherewithal writes:
is it possible that this straining for the material unconscious is a sign that the concept of matter isn’t doing any work for us anymore? Can we continue to theorize about objects and physical systems without recourse to it ? Physics doesn’t seem to have any kind of ultimate matter, or most basic, solid stuff, whether in the form of atoms or some kind of flow. Biological systems make their own elements out of energy and (bio)chemicals. Why not talk about all of this without raising any ultimate concept of matter? There are objects of many different kinds, none more real than any other, whether we’re on the scale of neutrons, chairs, or cells. Its seems like there’s a certain convergence around this kind of materialism without matter in Luhmann, Sloterdijk, and Harman, among others. Heisenberg has been called idealist for his critique of substantialism in Physics and Philosophy, but isn’t he doing something more like physics sans the concept of matter?
In media theory, it’s clear that discursive practices are always bound up with the resistance of things. They can’t get away with just being abstract or conceptual, taking place in some immaterial space of language or thought. And then in feminist theory, there’s been the focus for decades now on how embodiment affects discursive practice.
The idea that matter is a-semiotic and a-conceptual seems to require an immaterial ontological plane, which seems to work against a naturalistic meta-philosophy.
So the three questions would be, isn’t there already a lot of work in the “humanities” that takes resistance of things seriously?
Do we need the concept of matter for a naturalistic philosophy of objects and practices?
Doesn’t the passion for the real of matter and things resinscribe the matter/form distinction in spite of best intentions against hylomorphism, by reaching for an ultimate, most real substance–and then, conversely, doesn’t it make the conceptual or linguistic realm seem all the more immaterial, which it can never really be (especially if we’re avoiding logocentrism)?
Hopefully Wherewithal will say a bit about what he takes matter to be. This issue, of course, is one of the central sites where Harman and I disagree. Harman sees materialism as inherently reductive, whereas I think there’s plenty of room for an irreductive materialism (through theories of emergence). Harman argues that there are immaterial objects and therefore believes, for example, that reincarnation is possible because soul can be separated from body (a consequence that would follow from his defense of substantial forms via Suárez), whereas I reject the notion that there are any immaterial entities. In my view, there are only physical beings.
In his post Wherewithal seems to contrast matter and energy. However, in my view, the two terms are synonyms. All that is required for a position to count as a materialism, in my view, is a commitment to the physical as exhaustive of all being, whatever the physical might turn out to be. However, while I find much of value in Lucretius’s atomism, I do not advocate his conception of matter as being composed of ultimate, impenetrable and indivisible particles. Rather, I think of matter as energy. This is why the concept of entropy is so important to me. Things are both always in a perpetual state of motion, even when they appear to be standing still, they are pervaded by activity, and they must sustain themselves across time to continue existing (they’re perpetually falling apart). Where the physical is abandoned, we’re either moving in the direction of idealism or a theology.
As I argue in this post, following Adorno, the thing to be avoided is the identification of matter with the concept. This, I believe, is the reduction of matter to the concept. The concept, of course, is that which is present to consciousness or intellect. In reducing matter to the concept, we authorize ourselves to ignore the things of the world. This is what Oyama is getting at with her concept of hylephobia and her critique of Dawkins and Dennett for reducing genes to pure information and arguing for the substrate neutrality of these genes. What gets ignored in these moves are all of the processes unfolding at the chemical and environmental level that contribute just as significantly to what the phenotype becomes. Genes become a blueprint that ineluctably unfold according to a plan, such that the developed organism (sic.) is but a copy of this blueprint. The multiple paths and possibilities of development disappear because the genes are seen as already containing all the information for the developed organism. (The lecture I link to in the post is well worth listening to). From a political standpoint, of course, I think we can see why this is such a matter of concern as it is a form of genetic determinism. I see something similar at work in the focus on text and concept in the humanities (especially in philosophy and literary studies). At any rate, hylephobia and logocentrism are synonyms.
read on!
In the post, I list a number of disciplines in the humanities that take matter seriously: media studies, science and technology studies, ecotheory, certain strains of feminism and queer theory, etc. These disciplines are led to take matter seriously because of the nature of the object they investigate. Media theory, at its best, necessarily has to contend with material technologies such as fiber optic cables, smart phones, programming platforms, etc. In addition to a focus on meaningful content, it has to look at the contributions that these technologies make to how we relate in the world. Science studies has to– when it’s at its best –look at the contributions made by the entities investigated in the lab as well as the equipment or tools used in these investigations. Certain variants of feminism– especially the new materialist feminisms –increasingly came to pay attention to the body qua body and not simply as a text nor as a lived experience. Likewise, it’s impossible to do ecotheory without attending to interrelationships between physical entities. I also referenced thinkers like Latour, Haraway, Ong, Kittler, and McLuhan. However, it’s important to remember that from a sociological perspective, these disciplines and figures are largely on the periphery of the humanities. By and large, logocentrism– which I’ll here treat rather vulgarly as that orientation that is oriented towards the text and discursive –reigns hegemonic in the humanities. If we treat philosophy and literary theory as the two fields that dominate the humanities, then the former endlessly focuses on the conceptual, while the latter (not surprisingly) focuses on the textual. The material tends to get erased. In philosophy this is inexcusable. In literary theory this makes sense as, after all, it is texts that are being investigated. The problem arises when we make the move to investigating power and why social assemblages take the form they take and we end up referring almost entirely to the order of the signifier and the concept to account for these things.
I think the concept of matter does a great deal of work at the level of concrete analysis if we attend to it. This is already shown in the natural sciences by the work of orientations such as developmental systems theory and epigenetics. Your style of analysis becomes very different. In the humanities it makes quite a difference as well. First, it leads us to be more cautious about how the discursive and signifying exercise power. If we begin from the premise that everything must be physical to be, then we also hold that this must hold true– no matter how strange it sounds –for discursive and signifying formations as well. From this it will follow that in order for a discursive formation to exercise power it must travel throughout a population. The fastest rate at which information can currently travel is 186,282 mps (the speed of light), but generally information travels at a much slower rate depending on whether it is conveyed through speech, writing, telephone, etc. And, of course, it will not travel everywhere. This seems like a trivial point, but it underlines the fact that power is geographical. When we understand that discursive power is geographical, we also understand that it is not enough simply to debunk a particular ideological formation, but we must also determine whether or not that discursive formation is really in a particular population, to what extent, and must determine whether or not our critique is reaching that population.
Here, then, is a serious problem with my beloved Luhmann. Luhmann teaches us a great deal about the semiotic content of social formations, but fails to adequately theorize the material media that render social relations possible. He argues that societies are composed entirely of communications (not people), but does not meaningfully examine the media that allow these communications to take place. What difference did Roman roads make for the Roman empire? What difference do satellites make to economy and warfare, not to mention social control? Does it make a difference when a person or group of people such as those living in a remote region of Alaska are not linked in a communication network? Luhmann teaches us a great deal about codes, distinctions, selective relations to an environment in communication, how social formations reproduce themselves through communications and so on, yet the material dimension of social relations is almost entirely invisible within his sociology. What is missed, therefore, is an entire dimension of power and how power functions. This arises directly from his dismissal of materialism. Clearly it is not a question of abandoning Luhmann. Luhmann is one of my key theorists alongside Deleuze, Lacan, Marx, Latour, Badiou, McLuhan, Lucretius, Andy Clark, and the developmental systems theorists. Rather, it’s a question of recognizing a fundamental blindspot that arises from a certain logocentrism or hylephobia.
On the other hand, adopting a materialist framework means recognizing other forms of power beyond the discursive and semiotic. Our tendency in the humanities is to see ideology, norms, believes, signifiers as the source of power or the ground of social relations. There can be no doubt that these are significant contributors to the form social relations take. This is not in dispute. However, in our hylephobia and logocentrism, we fail to recognize the power exercised by materiality, by the things themselves. Where we do talk about things we treat them as carriers of meaning, not as making differences of their own accord. We fail to recognize the difference that the presence or absence of calories and other forms of energy make in social relations (thermopolitics). We don’t attend enough to the role that the structuration of time through labor and rates of communication play in social relations (chronopolitics). We don’t attend enough to the role played by features of geography and technological infrastructure in social relations (geopolitics). A materialist perspective brings these sources of power into relief, rescuing them from the invisibility that arises from the reasons I outlined in my last post (class position of academics and Heidegger’s observations about the withdrawal of tools when they are functioning), and therefore multiplies our possibilities of both analysis and intervention. Here we can think of Stacy Alaimo’s analysis of our ecological embedment or Latour’s actor-network analyses as models for this sort of analysis. For these reasons, I think that the concept of matter does quite a bit of work. Matter here is not merely conceived as “resistance”– the concept of resistance responds to an epistemological question of when we encounter something other than the discursive and intentional –but rather refers to the investigation of non-discursive contributions to assemblages of all kinds.
Larval Subjects . 
July 22, 2013 at 7:39 pm
http://anthem-group.net/2013/07/08/stacy-alaimobodily-natures-science-environment-and-the-material-self/
July 23, 2013 at 3:34 am
Whether you say everything is matter, or everything is Spirit, or everything is energy doesn’t matter. What matters is that avoid creating two separate things opposed to each other such as matter vs. non-matter, or matter vs. spirit, or matter vs. energy.
Instead I see it as more helpful to posit one substance which can show up in different ways. So if someone wishes to see this one substance as matter, that’s perfectly fine. For either way, we’re all interested in the “First Matter,” or primary substance and how it shows up.
The primary task is to discover the “first matter.”
Joe
July 23, 2013 at 4:52 am
I disagree, Joe. Ontology makes quite a difference to practice and the conceptual schemes we embrace have consequences. In the States we see this clearly on the issues of climate change, evolution, feminism, and queer politics. Sometimes you have to choose and be honest. Not everyone can get along and not everything can be reconciled.
July 24, 2013 at 7:35 am
I can’t say much about what I think matter is, because it seems to me that “matter” is a master signifier that produces the imaginary of a unified, monist substance. Physics doesn’t have an ultimate matter, it has all manner of fields, particles, and probabilistic clouds. To continue using “matter” tends to undermine all of these other objects of knowledge in favor of a more basic substance. In that sense Harman seems to be right: in practice, taking about matter usually means reducing objects to a more basic and homogenous stuff that they’re made out of, despite the fact that we never encounter raw formless matter, but formed objects wherever we look.
“Matter” suggests a single all-encompassing stuff that is more real than other objects. I might be wrong, but it seems that in physics “matter” is not precisely defined, but mass is. E=mc2 shows how mass can be converted to energy and vice versa. But does it make sense to posit an identity, matter, that remains the same through the conversion. Matter and energy are convertible but not the same. The other thing to mention is that physics isn’t just about matter. So I agree that “where the physical is abandoned, we’re either moving in the direction of idealism or a theology,” as you write, but it seems that the physical or the natural (in the sense of philosophical naturalism) can’t be identified with matter. Physics also deals with entities that are not matter, and when it deals with matter, it doesn’t define matter precisely but rather mass and volume. In that sense, I think there can be immaterial entities, but not non-physical entities. When you “reject the notion that there are any immaterial entities” and write that “in my view, there are only physical beings,” this distinction seems to get lost.
But for the most part, when we’re talking about matter in the humanities or social sciences, we’re not talking about physics per se, nor do I think we should do so or treat physics as the final word in the ontology of the physical. So here I have two points. 1) When we talk about matter in our disciplinary contests as the outside of the discursive and conceptual, we’re usually talking about objects rather than matter. We’re interested in objects and how then function in systems and assemblages. In this case, the objects vs. matter claims of Harman and Morton make sense to me. What matters is the form of a sculpture and the fact it’s made of granite, or the bank building’s relation to the economy and the fact it’s held up by steel. Functionally, the girders work because they’re made of steel, not paper or butter. All three of those substances are made of matter, ostensibly, but what does that tell us functionally? So for thinkers dealing with social questions, who want to address the non-discursive outside, it’s not usually matter but the functions and properties of more specific objects that makes for good analysis. When it’s not, and we’re talking about the aspect of the objects that is withdrawn from relation, I think that it makes sense to refer, as you do in Democracy of Objects, which I think is excellent, to something like virtual proper being, a reservoir of potentiality not determined by relations. 2)When virtual proper being gets referred to as materiality in the context of philosophy or literary studies, in my reading and experience it usually refers to something more real than function. For example, in a recent talk, I heard that ruins, because they are de-functionalized, reveal something about materiality that is hidden when we understand buildings in terms of their function. I like this reading, except that I think that calling what gets revealed “matter” or “materiality” is problematic because it refers matter to what’s more real and essential, and because what’s revealed by defunctionalization is not materiality in general but still some other concatenation of formed objects. It seems that when we talk about materiality in the disciplines you mention, as in the new materialism which addresses the ontology of matter, we’re not usually chasing the most basic sense of what matter might mean in physics. We’re talking about something else, still physical, but not some materiality in general. Often theorists use the term, as in the above example, or in Bennett, but when they do so it seems like to me like a stopgap measure. It’s possible that materiality in this sense is a desired outside that we refer to in order to break out of the traps you mention that privilege discourse and social construction too much. What’s necessary after that step, as Tim Morton seems to suggest, is to move through the deconstruction of “matter” in order to do ontology without it getting caught in the reductionist and monist problems “matter” tends to reinscribe.
I agree that the concept of emergence allows one to avoid reductionism in the way you describe. Emergence seems like a crucial concept to me. When we’re talking about an emergent object like a swarm, though, is it necessary to say that it emerges out of a more basic level of matter, and that that level is primary? It seems that emergence (and the related notion of scale variance) is a strong reason to think about abandoning the concept of matter in OOO and the new “materialism.” This is not to suggest that some kind of transcendental supplement makes emergence possible. I think it can be explained in naturalistic terms. But if matter is the basic stuff that stays matter through all its transformations, and matter is ultimately a monistic single-sac of ultimate particles and waves, then the point of emergence seems to be lost. Emergence suggests that matter becomes something other than itself. But writing it this way puts in place a narrative that starts with matter as if with something raw, and posits an emergence that comes later. Maybe we’re dealing with something more like emergence all the way down, as it were, so that positing a basic single substance ignores that fact that the substance is always already shot through with emergent cuts and gaps. This might be illustrated by a reading of Lucretius that makes the originary swerve hypothetical, and I think the grammatical mood is subjunctive in the text itself. The homogenous pre-swerve condition is a retroactive projection of the first difference. But in fact this never happened, because matter differs from itself and only ever exists in its clumps and coagulations. No monism, no dualism, but an infinitism of emergent gaps. Positing a material substrate more basic than the clumps, or a matter conceived as active power that ultimately produces the clumps like solar flares from its sun, might be similar to controlled ecological experiments that simplify everything down to a few variables.
One other factor might be the point I mentioned earlier, that matter isn’t all that physics deals with. So explaining emergent properties would require reference to something other than the activity and potentiality of matter. Naturalism is broader that materialism, without becoming immaterial or theological.
There is also the scale question. Scale variance, which JBS Haldane discusses delightfully in “On Being the Right Size,” is the notion that different physical constraints apply at different scales. This is one of the reasons insects can’t get much bigger than they are without circulatory systems, why King Kong’s bones would have broken, and why macro scale engineering principles aren’t suitable at the nanoscale. I wonder if scale variance also cuts gaps through materialism. Ontologically different scales (that is, a scale with specific principles that constrain individuation in ways that are not significant at other scales) could mean that we’re not dealing with the same matter in each case, and so there’s no point in using the word matter at each scale, because it inscribes and underlying identity.
You acknowledge that the discursive and conceptual are hard to imagine as physical, which is probably true. You rightly, I think, note how that the same problem comes up in writing on heredity and ontogeny, where matter and information are split with causal privilege falling to the latter. Oyama is a good corrective, as are data from epigenetics, systems biology, and research into symbiogenesis. I totally agree that substrate neutrality is hylomorphic bunk.
I very much appreciate the point you bring up about geography, that power is geographical (cf. Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography” in Power/Knowledge). Discourse has a geography and works in constant contact with its non-discursive environment, with physical beings, and with itself (as physical being). This is where I think that Bateson is wrong to argue that information has no place or topos in Steps, no location because it is a form produced by difference not a thing. Even as a form, information has a geography. This point applies also to the arguments Andy Clark (who you mention in your response) makes about the externality of consciousness, points that Derrida and Bateson have also made, among others. If consciousness cuts across the skin, it has a geography, which could be described in terms of its fixed or ephemeral cirques and insulae. This makes me look very much forward to your Ontocartographies project.
“If we begin from the premise that everything must be physical to be, then we also hold that this must hold true– no matter how strange it sounds –for discursive and signifying formations as well.” For sure. Part of the reason for my response, though, is that in your posts from Hylephobia to Does Matter Matter? there is a matter/discourse logic at work that seems to ignore this claim about the physicality of discursive formations. There are several places where this happens, but I think you end up with contradiction when you write that “ Matter is a-semiotic, a-conceptual. This is quite different, I add, than saying matter is formless” and “ If we treat philosophy and literary theory as the two fields that dominate the humanities, then the former endlessly focuses on the conceptual, while the latter (not surprisingly) focuses on the textual. The material tends to get erased.” It is hard to see how this could be the case if the discursive is also physical. If the discursive is physical, we’d have to make political decisions about the kinds of physical objects to study without recourse to a distinction between material/immaterial that may or may not be value laden. Thus the next paragraph. It also seems to me that matter can’t be a-semiotic if everything is physical. The semiotic is also physical, so matter can become semiotic, which isn’t to say that it is in all cases. This might be another place where positing an underlying matter, as the notion of a “material unconscious” seems to do, gets too close to the reductive materialism that posits the basic, underlying matter as the most real. In any case, in striving for the material real in order to clear the fluff of over-focus on text and concept, the logic that comes into play seems to me to produce an immaterial realm in spite of itself.
I agree that we need to think about media and non-discursive structures of power, thermopolitics, etc. The good old two cultures problem militates against this, of course, by quarantining the humanities in the immaterial realm of mind and culture and leaving the physical up to science. This doesn’t make sense any more. But after the new materialist’s stopgap desire for the material, we need to understand how the discursive and non-discursive, conceptual and non-conceptual entwine within the physical, but without collapsing into one another.
When you write that “adopting a materialist framework means recognizing other forms of power beyond the discursive and semiotic,” I agree that matter can do a lot of work. But this is where I think the distinction has to be made between historical materialism and other forms of scientific, philosophical, and new materialism. In Marx, the materialism in question doesn’t so much require a theory of matter in its properties and activities. It might be that the matter that takes the shape of the factory system and has agency in determining the social relations that attend to that system works in X way or Y manner. The point for historical materialism isn’t in the debate whether, for example, matter consists of virtual underdetermined aspects as well as actual determined aspects. The point for historical materialism seems to be that infrastructure is the primary causal suspect in the organization of social relations and the formation of ideology. The activity of matter—its non-blah, morphogenetic qualities—that new materialists et al are interested in doesn’t seem necessary for the basic theory design of historical materialism. It seems that Marx’s arguments can make sense whether situated in the context of 19th century mechanistic ontologies of matter, or some of the more lively versions we’re working with now, after quantum mechanics, chaos, and complexity theory. If you’re a sociologist whether the difference between rich and poor people should be explained by a continuum of spiritual perfection, or rather by the conditions under which they live and labor, you should choose the later and become a historical materialist—which doesn’t say anything about matter qua matter.
I think I agree about Luhmann, but should stop writing. It might be the case that by abandoning materialism he doesn’t abandon the physical or stay in the realm of communication strictly, especially in the case of his general systems theory. I think there is also something interesting to be said about the medium/form distinction in Luhmann. Medium and form are relativized, so that form becomes medium at another level, and so on. I wonder if this also relates to distinctions like material/immaterial, concrete/abstract. As if from a “higher” level of abstraction, what seemed abstract now seems concrete. Similarly, from the scale of atoms, the solid chair now seems an airy abstraction.
July 24, 2013 at 8:23 pm
Wherewithal,
I pretty much think that Morton and Harman’s abandonment of matter and assimilation of objects to form is catastrophic and to be avoided at all costs. What begins as a philosophical framework that should bring us back to the flesh of the earth, instead turns out authorizing, once again, the erasure of that earth. I also suspect that there’s a lot of anxiety about science in these critiques that arise out of a desire to carve out a distinct place for the humanities. I should also add that I find Harman’s arguments against materialism to be extremely weak, bordering on strawmen. For example, he argues that the New York stock exchange cannot be reduced to bricks, glass, steel, wires, etc. He’s right! However, nothing about materialism requires us to deny that organization is a key component to what beings are. All that’s required is that for any organization that exists, that organization must be embodied. That’s it. So long as you’re committed to the thesis that whatever exists must be embodied, you’re working within a materialist framework. The upshot of this is that “materialism” and “reductionism” are not synonyms. While there are reductionist materialisms, there are also many more irreductive materialisms. Materialism is not to be contrasted with emergence, but rather with immaterialism that holds that things such as souls, platonic forms, spirits, etc., exist. It is the thesis that everything must be embodied. Even Lucretius held to this position, continuously pointing out how different sorts of beings can only be accounted for through the way in which atoms are organized in assemblages, i.e., the parts alone do not account for what the being is, but rather the relations between parts matter as well.
A few further remarks:
1) We do not know a priori what matter is, but only discover this through empirical investigation. This is part of what attests to the reality of matter or that it is not simply a construct of thought. The same cannot be said when you reduce– and it is a reduction –objects to forms.
2) Materialism does not entail that physics is the only science of being. Within an irreductive materialism cognizant of emergence, we get different forms of organization at different levels of scale: subatomic, atomic, chemical, biological, psychological, social, etc. At each level of scale and organization, we get immanent “laws” or principles of organization that could not have been deduced from the lower levels (but which are consistent with the lower levels). As a consequence, we get a variety of different fields of investigation. Physics just doesn’t have anything to tell us about economy, though anything that takes place in economy has to be consistent with physics. Likewise, we can’t infer the properties of orangutangs from quantum mechanics, but whatever biological processes take place in orangutangs must nonetheless be consistent with physics. Roy Bhaskar is great on these points in books like The Possibility of Naturalism. Well worth the read.
3) I find it odd to suggest that materialism somehow leads to the view that there must be one type of homogeneous matter. Even the Greco-Roman atomists held that the atoms come in a variety of different shapes. For them, this was crucial to accounting for the different types of entities that exist. Today we see from the sciences that there are a nearly unlimited number of different types of physical entities. The fact that two entities are of two different types of physical stuff doesn’t entail that they are somehow not material. In this regard, materialism = pluralism.
4) I would like to know what immaterial entities physics and the other sciences study. Even light, in physics, has material/energetic being.
5) I strongly disagree with your reading of Marx. The foundation of Marx’s historical materialism revolves around biological bodies (material entities) acting on other material entities (clay, steel, coal, wood, etc), producing new entities by giving them form. This is why Marx’s materialism is a genuine materialism (and let’s not forget that his dissertation was on the Greco-Roman atomists). The shift to practice from conceptuality (Hegelian idealism) was a shift to engage with material entities, by material entities. Through Marx’s writings you will find detailed discussions of features of geography, available resources, fatigued bodies, weather events, etc., etc., etc. (all materiality). Sadly, in subsequent “movement Marxism” and academic Marxism, this gets lost and we again return to the primacy of the discursive and the erasure of the material.
Regarding the semiotic, the point is not that iterability doesn’t exist, that we can’t talk about formal structures, etc.. The point is that these things must always be materially embodied: they must exist in brains, computer data banks, pieces of paper, skywriting, etc., and they must travel throughout the world. It’s for this reason that there’s no “immaterial realm”. We can talk about formal structures, but those formal structures never exist anywhere but in the material world, and this fact has profound consequences for how we think about the nature of social relations and political interventions.
July 26, 2013 at 10:47 pm
Wherewithal,
I wanted to add that it seems to me that you’re saying all sorts of things about matter, not simply treating it as an empty master-signifier. This comes out especially in your remarks about reduction, matter being homogenous, and so on. As I said in my previous response, I find the erasure of matter to be catastrophic. Good ecological and actor network analysis means attending to the flesh of the earth, things, materiality. That is erased when things are reduced to form. I also believe that philosophy’s erasure of matter throughout it’s history is an erasure of both labor and embodiment, the first in the name of a privileged class, the latter in the name of religious obscurantism. Finally, the erasure of matter is an erasure of the importance of time, energy, and geography in social relations. These are the differences the concept of matter makes. The real question should be who and what benefits when the concept of matter is treated as an empty master-signifier? What relations of power and privilege are clothed in such an enunciation? Were we to abandon the concept of matter, what practices would change (quite a few, I suspect). When we forefront the concept of matter, how do our practices change?
July 30, 2013 at 2:37 am
I remember having cited the topic of reincarnation in a luncheon conversation with you and Harman at the New School a few years ago, as a way of illustrating your differences over the issue of matter. I recall him looking pretty surprised when I mentioned it. He seemed to have forgotten that he had ever brought up reincarnation at any point in his work. After the talk was over, I reminded him that he had off-handedly mentioned it once in “Prince of Networks.” He replied that he didn’t remember that.
The relevant sentence is: “Even the New Age movement, despised by most intellectuals, speculates on themes of interest to any human: life after death, reincarnation, the meaning of dreams, the spirit uniting humans and animals, omens invading our lives to signal the future, and shared archetypes at work in multiple individuals.” (PoN, 148)
I’ve no major reason for pointing this out. Your post just reminded me of that exchange, and I figured I’d share what I remembered.
February 21, 2014 at 6:46 pm
[…] reducing matter to the concept, we authorize ourselves to ignore the things of the world” see here.) Bryant believes that through the concept of emergence we can secure both irreductive materiality […]