tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post7079083500212021223..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Quasi-Objects and the Interconnectedness of Everything with Everything Else: A Response to Stuart Elden at "Progressive Geographies"Cord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-58163144378347953652011-02-05T16:22:17.423-05:002011-02-05T16:22:17.423-05:00Karl: like you, I am very much enamored of much of...Karl: like you, I am very much enamored of much of Harman's thinking on the withdrawnness of objects, but I think I may ultimately disagree that saying everything is part of "the mesh" [Morton] or "networks" [Latour] means that there is no possibility of space and/or chance [indeed, in Morton's book "The Ecological Thought" he references Menger's sponge, which is a 3D rendering of the Cantor set [the basis of fractal geometry], which gives us a picture of the universe with as many "points" as "no points," as many "no places" as "places"--infinite, in both cases.<br /><br />I'm also not sure that there can ever be anything like a pure/indifferent "for itself" of any particular object [whether fire, sunbeam, stalk of wheat, dog, person, whatever]. And that's because everything that exists [I really believe] is always already a sort of composite of different materials, forces, actions/reactions, etc. that can never just be off "by themselves" somewhere--there is no "inner molten core" as Harman sometimes posits it. Also, if I share DNA with chimpanzees as well as with daffodils, what part of the daffodil, or me, could ever be purely "for itself"? In what manner or form? I like to think that the idea that there is really no zero-point [or maybe 1-point would be a better way of putting it: there is no *one* unique factor that any existing entity possesses that no other entity possesses] for anything, identity and/or form-wise and/or "being"-wise, and I think this might eventually free us from the sort of identity politics that have brought about so many historical and other catastrophes.<br /><br />You have no idea how much I want to believe there is, somewhere, a "for-itself"; I just ... don't believe it [although I've gestured toward it in some of my writings previously]. Ultimately, I don't believe there is any such thing as a "distant itselfness" [although for ethical purposes, we may have to posit that now and then to protect certain entities in certain ways "for the common good," with the common good reimagined more largely along the lines of Latour's "parliament of things"]. Nothing is really distant from anything else--here I side more with Morton who sees an intimate/strange proximity between everything [which we are often at pains to NOT acknowledge--more and more I see all of the defenses of "precious" differences as ultimately leading to violence, which is not to saw we should not be struck with ethical wonder at all of the beautifully strange forms of this world]--there is no "kernel" of the Real at the bottom or "heart" of anything: that seems more and more to me like an illusion we should dispense with.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-71555369707263958422011-02-04T17:34:59.039-05:002011-02-04T17:34:59.039-05:00NOT '0' (zero) comments!NOT '0' (zero) comments!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-65334974244089586982011-02-04T12:25:24.447-05:002011-02-04T12:25:24.447-05:00Thanks for this post, Eileen.
In re: this questio...Thanks for this post, Eileen.<br /><br />In re: this question from Stuart Eden,<br /><br /><i>Another is the question of access at a historical distance. How can I write about ‘territory’ as a word, concept and practice, in the early modern period, for instance, without the mediation of texts of some sort? They might be works of political theory, they might be treaties or lawbooks, they might be technical manuals of landsurveying or maps, but in some sense they would be textual, and textual strategies would be the way of access</i><br /><br />The answer is material objects. Artifacts. Their disposition, arrangement, preservation, etc., says something to us if we are willing to attend to them. The problem of most of our encounters with our medieval/modern field is that it's too directed to written texts given over to us in printed editions, when there's so much more that we can use to have the Middle Ages speak. This is one of the reasons I find Jeffrey's rocks project so exciting, and it's one of the reasons I thought Kathleen Kelly's landscape paper at the MLA so great.<br /><br />In re: interconnectedness. This is true for Latour, and maybe for Morton, but it's not true for Harman, for whom all real objects have <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=EWsqTjt6LYkC&lpg=PA100&dq=harman%20graham%20galaxy&pg=PA100#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow">a withdrawn existence inaccessible in their fullness from contact with other real objects.</a> It's precisely this <i>lack</i> of full interconnection that preserves objects from each other, allowing for the existence of space,* and, as well, allowing for chance to happen. <br /><br />Two things I love about Harman: a) the possibility of indifference: that fire, for example, can be indifferent to the color of the cotton it burns, but this doesn't mean the color of the cotton is any less real: by extension, I like that not everything is "for me" and that not everything will every be available for me, because, like everything else, I'm conditioned by my <i>umwelt</i>; b) all vicarious causation is also immediate. Or is this Morton? The distant galaxy that affects a butterfly does not do so distantly, but directly, because no touch is distant touch. This beautiful thought (from whom?) brings the medieval so close to me (while also preserving its distant itselfness).<br /><br />* Harman: "Any attempt to describe space adequately must concede that space involves the relation of objects that do not <i>entirely</i> relate. In other words, the simultaneous withdrawal of real objects from one another and their partial contact through simulacra is space itself....space itself <i>is</i> the mutual exteriority of objects, and their partial contact with one another, however this might occur."Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.com