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Ode to Man
Tho’ many are the terrors,
not one more terrible than man goes.
This one beyond the grizzled sea
in winter storming to the south
He crosses, all-engulfed,
cutting through, up from under swells.
& of the gods She the Eldest, Earth
un-withering, un-toiling, is worn down,
As the Twisting Plough’s year
into Twisting Plough’s year,
Through the breeding of horse, he turns.
& the lighthearted race of birds
all-snaring he drives them
& savage beasts, their clan, & of the sea,
marine in kind
With tightly-wound meshes spun
from all-seeing is Man.
Yet too, he masters by means of pastoral
beast, mountain-trodding,
The unruly-maned horse holding fast,
‘round the neck yoked,
& the mountain’s
ceaseless bull.
& the voice & wind-fast thought
& the passion for civic ways
He has taught, so from crag’s poor court
from under the ether’s hard-tossed arrows
To flee, this all-crossing one. Blocked, he comes
upon nothing so fated.
From Hades alone escape he’ll not bring.
Tho’ from sickness impossible
Flight he has pondered.
A skilled one, devising of arts beyond hope,
Holding at times an evil,
But then to the noble he crawls,
honoring the laws of the Earth, &
Of gods the oath so just,
high-citied.
Citiless is the one who with the un-beautiful
dwells, boldly in grace.
Never for me a hearth-mate
may he have been, never equal in mind
He who offers this.
Ode to Man
A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree—to the degree corresponding to
the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent
of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities. The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it
changes gradient. "No organ is constant as regards either function or position, . . . sex organs sprout anywhere,... rectums open, defecate and close, . . . the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments." The tantric egg. After all, is not Spinoza's Ethics the great book of the BwO?
Ode to Man
But human power is extremely limited, and is infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes; we have not, therefore, an absolute power of shaping to our use those things which are without us. Nevertheless, we shall bear with an equal mind all that happens to us in contravention to the claims of our own advantage, so long as we are conscious, that we have done our duty, and that the power which we possess is not sufficient to enable us to protect ourselves completely; remembering that we are a part of universal nature, and that we follow her order. If we have a clear and distinct understanding of this, that part of our nature which is defined by intelligence, in other words the better part of ourselves, will assuredly acquiesce in what befalls us, and in such acquiescence will endeavour to persist. For, in so far as we are intelligent beings, we cannot desire anything save that which is necessary, nor yield absolute acquiescence to anything, save to that which is true: wherefore, in so far as we have a right understanding of these things, the endeavour of the better part of ourselves is in harmony with the order of nature as a whole.
I understand that you’re interacting particularly with Sinthome’s ontic principle here, but you’re also alluding to Dr. Zamalek’s tool-being object-orientedness. I’ve not seen the two of them discuss it, but I’d think that Zamalek would reject the “difference that makes a difference” criterion for establishing the ontic status of an object. Since for Dr. Z objects make differences in one another only vicariously, and since those differences never touch the essential nature of the objects, making-difference is excluded tout court as a distinguishing feature of a separate object. Difference resides inside each object — that’s what makes gives it ontic distinction. But that difference is some combination of the object’s properties, as well as its unique wholistic integrity, rather than the processes that operate on the object or that brought it into existence. This I think puts Sinthome on the empirical side of Dr. Z’s occasionalist-empiricist divide among philosophers.
Ktismatics,
Well, actually I’m not really addressing Levi’s use of the “difference that makes a difference” determination because he too does not follow Bateson closely, I am addressing Bateson’s defintion which is an Idealist-type, inside/outside connection. As I’ve pointed out Levi’s so called Ontic Principle is as old as Plato’s Sophist, so that really is where I am beginning. Or…What happens to Bateson’s defintion of information if we strip it of its Idealist priority? This not a place at all where Levi would go, as he already has stated in rather emphatic terms that he has no interest in the validity of a panpsychic reading of Being. My interesting really is in the philosopher Tommaso Campanella.
As far as Graham’s “tool being” and “object orientation” these too were not things that I immediately had in mind. These are rather thoughts that I have been developing for a while in terms of necessary expansions of Spinoza’s metaphysics (that is, there are implicit consequences that follow from the definitions he makes about a body), as they relate to Campanella’s cognoscere est esse. It just so happens that my recent engagement with Graham’s Object-Oriented Philosophy sharpened and accelerated my cybernetic reading of Spinoza, mostly because I feel that Graham’s pursuit of deepening the flat ontologies of post-structuralism really are best served by a turn to Spinoza and panpsychism, and the embodied transformations that occur with epistemic change (a move he resists to a great degree, though perhaps mostly due to the fashion of Spinoza’s appeal these days).
So when you sum:
“Since for Dr. Z objects make differences in one another only vicariously, and since those differences never touch the essential nature of the objects, making-difference is excluded tout court as a distinguishing feature of a separate object. Difference resides inside each object — that’s what makes gives it ontic distinction.”
Graham’s objection makes no sense in a Spinoza’s metaphysics because the essence of objects is not cut off from their manifestation. One can read the essence of an object (any body) as residing in Substance/God/Nature under an aspect of eternity, but then expressed modally in the full richness of its modal manifestation. The modal expression of the essence is the fully concrete path of its existence and action. The essence is and acts modally. This immanent relation thus is not fundamentally one of tension, but of expression. But additionally, any delineation of an object is already shot through with cross-sections of other objects (in Spinoza, bodies), which is the point I’m trying to bring forth in my notion of Conjoined Semiosis. Because Graham’s object orientation is skewed by a Central Clarity of Consciousness (that is to say Idealist) conception of Being, he is already locked into an Idealist binary conception, giving the illusion of an essential binarism. One binary breeds so many others, twos on twos.
What I would like to tell Graham is that the primary retreat of the object, the chasm of its essence and its qualities, is an ontological illusion born of his Idealist vocabulary heritage (Husserl to Descartes). The tensioned retreat is rather a product of the objects Conjoined Semiosis, across its fabric, with other objects (not mere reciprocality).
The difference does nto reside inside the object because there is no vector which determines one extensional/ideational expression to be an object more than any other (Graham is too concerned with the object that floats in the mind’s eye, surrounded by a simplification of nothingness, this is not how conciousness is). The difference resides across the object, as a product of its inside/outside delineation. Which is to say, it is not reduced to some existential retreat (which is rather captured in immanence), but by the very warp and weft (in particular the cross weft semiosis) of its concrete manifestation: the intergral parts of an object are already integral to other objects. The difference is directional.
As I say though, this reading of mine is only occasioned by Graham’s Object-Orientation. His Idealist foundations I feel are countervailing to his post-human ontological ambitions which will eventually send him towards all out panpsychism (he is inching closer). In general, I find the pre-occupation with objects under a prima facie simplicity of essentialized border already a symptom of an optical metaphor that philosophy should surpass. Any object is already vectored in real, semiotic investments against itself.
As to Levi, honestly his metaphysics seems to be in deep transition or oscillation, and I am not quite sure where it is heading. It seems pulled in every direction, Latour, Lacan, Deleuze, Bateson. What we share is that both of us have been long influenced by early readings of Bateson and some affinity for Deleuze, but that is probably about all. I wish him the best of luck, but he does not seem amenable to questioning.
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Sorry for not following up, but I’ve gotten distracted.
“A stone does not respond to information,” says Bateson. “To respond in a behavioral sense, the stone would have to use energy contained within itself, as organisms do.”
I’m not going to make a strong argument here, but consider a stone breaking loose from a boulder at the top of a hill. The stone contains potential energy within itself. It responds to information: I’ve not reached my equilibrium point in this environment; I can release kinetic energy by rolling down the hill, thereby getting a little bit closer to the center of the earth that’s drawing me to itself. This I think is at least one realist’s interpretation of a stone using information. Is this panpsychist or no, do you think?
I’m about to post something on just this point, the question of Spinoza’s panpsychism and how to read it. It includes a reference to Augustine’s claim that stones are indeed sentient to some degree, making just the point that you seem to be making (minus the concept of potential energy).
Bateson is rather interested in narrowly defining “respond” so to favor the aspect of mind that makes a strict category.
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