razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: relations

  • bordering on coherence

    bordering on coherence

    [NOTE TO ANY READER: this post is a classic example of pinball thought, ricochet rather than writing, a ‘thinking out loud’.  Beware of any apparent seriousness and discussion.]

    In a recent post on his blog Poetix discusses the ‘object oriented’ philosophy of Graham Harman.  I have only recently come across Harmans’ work, primarily because I have only recently returned to work on Heidegger and his various books began appearing in 2002, when I was deeply immersed in Deleuziana.  His approach looks fascinating and is one I hope to more familiar with by the end of the year.

    Poetix begins his post with the claim that an object cannot be fully understood through relationality because it must maintain an unrelatable element.  It must maintain this ‘occult’ aspect of an unrelated element because if it did not then “there would be no object as such, but only the differential field of appearances itself“.  The use of the phrase ‘differential field’ here immediately enables a connection to Deleuze’s philosophy (amongst others perhaps), not least because of his Nietzschean inspired claim that an object is nothing but a conjunction of forces (cf NP).  For Deleuze, then, an object is nothing but that which is produced by a differential field of forces.  It looks like we might have two very different answers to the problem of object-ness at work here, two different answers to a question such as ‘is an object nothing but the relations which constitute it?’  When you can get two clearly different solution vectors to a specific question then there is an opportunity to think a problem (in this case that of the object-ness of objects) through conceptual confrontation, through the tensions of thought.

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  • …and a lot of accidents

    …and a lot of accidents

    I’ve been watching some of the YouTube videos posted by the TED group, including one presentation by Murray Gell-Man (he of The quark and the jaguar).  Most of the presentations at TED seem short and sweet, not a lot of technical detail but a good – if broad – explanation of an interesting concept enabling people to gain something like a ‘lay of the land’ within intellectual life.

    One of the things Gell-Man was saying in his presentation which really struck home, however, was the role of accidents.  “The history of the universe is … co-determined by the basic law and an unimaginably long sequence of accidents (outcomes of chance events)” (Time: 4.59).  He re-emphasises this point at various places during the presentation, that accidents are crucial co-determinants of reality together with any basic law that exists.

    For a long time I’ve been fascinated by a short and simple point made by Deleuze.  “It will be said that the essence is by nature the most important thing. This however, is precisely what is at issue: whether the notions of importance and non-importance are not precisely notions which concern events or accidents, and are much more ‘important’ within accidents than the crude opposition between essence and accident itself.” (DR, P189, Athlone edition)

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  • Relations and reactions

    Relations and reactions

    dancing+graffiti_40910987In a post on Marx’s dialectical method and Deleuze, Steven Shaviro makes the interesting claim that it is Deleuze’s pluralism that is transcendental.  It is the theory of relations that Deleuze has which underpins his pluralism and this theory of relations, presumably, would be the place to look for a transcendental structure in the sense of a ‘condition of possibility’-type argument (Shaviro makes it explicit he’s referring to a Kantian transcendental when talking of Deleuze’s ‘transcendental pluralism).  Indeed this is plainly the case for Shaviro, since the article begins from the differences and similarities between dialectics and Deleuzian thought in terms of their theory of relations.  He suggests a strong commonality around this area of theory of relations, arguing that:

    “There are definite commonalities. (1) Both the Hegelian/dialectical language of negativity, and the James/Bergson/Deleuze language of virtuality, insist that all those things that are omitted by the positivist cataloguing of atomistic facts are altogether real. (2) Both locate this reality by asserting that the relations between things are as real as the things themselves, and that ‘things’ don’t exist first, but only come to be through their multiple relations. (3) Both construct materialist (rather than idealist) accounts of these relations, of how they constitute the real, and of how they continually change (over time) the nature of what is real.  (4) Both offer similar critiques of the tradition of bourgeois thought that leads from Descartes through the British empiricists and on to 20th century scientism and post-positivism. (numbers in brackets inserted)”

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