Tag Cloud
Achilles Affect Affects affectuum imitatio Antigone a thousand plateaus Augustine Autopoiesis Badiou Being Campanella capitalism Causation Cause Christiaan Huygens Davidson Death Deleuze Descartes Epistemology Ethics Freud Graham Harman Guattari Harman Hegel Heidegger Huygens Idea Imagination Immanence Information Johannes Hudde Kant Lacan Language Game Larval Subjects lathe Latour Lenses lens grinding Letter 39 Letter 40 Levi Bryant Massumi Metaphor Metaphysics microscope Negation Nietzsche object Object-Oriented Philosophy Ontology OOP Optics panpsychism Parables of the Virtual Philosophical Investigations Philosophy Plato Plotinus Poetry power Rorty Sophocles Spinoza Subject Substance Telescope Triangulation Truth Van Leeuwenhoek Vico Wim Klever Wittgenstein2001: a space odyssey Achilles Alan Gabbey Antigone Antonio Negri Arne Naess Art Criticism Augustine Avatar Badiou biosemiotics Bousquet Brian Massumi Caliban Campanella Chalmers Christiaan Huygens Colerus Conjoined Semiosis Critical Theory cybernetics Dante David Graeber David Skrbina Davidson Deleuze Della Rocca Derrida Descartes Duns Scotus Epistemology Ethics Euripedes Exowelt Felix Guattari Foucault Graham Harman Greek Tragedy Guattari Heidegger Helvetica Hevelius Hockney-Falco Thesis Hume Huygens Information John Donne Kepler Kubrick L'occhiale all'occhio Latour Leibniz Letter 39 Letter to Peter Balling Literary Theory Martha Nussbaum Marx Metaphor Micrographia Milton Morality Nicola Masciandaro Nietzsche Optica Promota Ovid Painting panpsychism Parables of the Virtual Patricia Collins Philosophy Philosophy of Mind Photosynth Plato Plotinus Politics Rhetoric Rilke Robert Hooke Rorty Sappho Simulated Annealing Skepticism Slavoj Zizek Sloterdijk Specilla circularia Spinoza Spinoza's Foci St. Paul The Buttle Principle Three Varieties of Knowledge Tommaso Campanella Uncategorized Van Leeuwenhoek Vico Walter Benjamin William of Auvergne Wittgenstein Zizek zombies Zuggtmoy
Recent Comments
Day One of Bullshit!… on Cookery, Cuisine and the Truth… | |
Dana on Conjoined Semiosis: A “N… | |
Kevin von Duuglas-It… on Conjoined Semiosis: A “N… | |
Dana on Conjoined Semiosis: A “N… | |
Prof. Brian J Ford on The 1661 Technique of “G… | |
Charles M. Saunders on As Lensmaker: A Quick Ove… | |
Kevin von Duuglas-It… on Spinoza Doubt? The Sephardim a… | |
George W. Singleton… on Spinoza Doubt? The Sephardim a… | |
Dean on The Objective truth of Ro… | |
Billy McMurtrie on A Book that Explodes All Books… |
Recent Posts
- Mitochondrial Vertigo: The New Blog
- Going Dark
- The Becoming-woman of Machine in Avatar
- The Difference Between a Description and an Explanation: Deficits in Latour
- Peking Opera and the Aesthetic Freedoms of Avatar
- Transcendence or Immanence: Cake-and-eat-it-too-ism
- From Affect to Mutuality, Openness to Rational Co-expression: Massumi to Spinoza
- Is the Medium the Message? Avatar’s Avatar
- Massumi’s Cognitive Doubling, Spinoza’s Numerical Affectivity
- Two Vectors of Avatar’s Cinematic Achievement: Affect and Space Interface
Blogroll
- Accursed Share
- alex-reid.net
- An und für sich
- Anodyne Lite
- Click Opera
- Critical Animal
- Dead Voles
- Deontologistics
- Ecology Without Nature
- Eliminative Culinarism
- Fido the Yak
- Grundlegung
- Immanence
- In the Middle
- Loxogonospherical Moods
- Lumpen Orientalism
- Metastable Equilibrium
- Methods of Projection
- Naught Thought
- Necessarily Eternal
- Para(s/c)ite
- Perverse Egalitarianism
- Pinocchio Theory
- Pirates and Revolutionaries
- Planomenology
- Prōlogus
- Quiet Sun
- Shaviro's Workblog
- Slawkenbergius’s Tales
- Speculative Heresy
- spinoza research network
- spinoza.blogse.nl
- Splintering Bone Ashes
- The Whim
- Utopian Realism
- Varieties of Unreligious Experience
- Velvet Howler
- Violent Signs
- Working Notes
Spinoza Primary Sources
- Ethics, Emendation, Tractatus and Letters, in Latin
- F. van den Enden website
- Hyperlinked Ethics, Emmendation, Tractatus and Letters
- Nicholas De Cusa’s “De Visione Dei”, English Translation
- Selected Letters, Elwes Translation
- Spinoza’s Complete Works, Shirley Translation
- Spinoza’s Works in Latin
- Spinozahuis
- The Life of Spinoza, by Johannes Colerus (1705)
Archive
- April 2010 (1)
- January 2010 (2)
- December 2009 (26)
- November 2009 (21)
- October 2009 (21)
- September 2009 (15)
- August 2009 (8)
- July 2009 (18)
- June 2009 (23)
- May 2009 (21)
- April 2009 (20)
- March 2009 (26)
- February 2009 (24)
- January 2009 (28)
- December 2008 (16)
- November 2008 (17)
- October 2008 (12)
- September 2008 (23)
- August 2008 (26)
- July 2008 (40)
- June 2008 (40)
- May 2008 (54)
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.
good morning!
Better keep my eyes peeled for the next post.
I don’t have the ref at hand but Maturana did once make a distinction between dissipative structures and autopoietic systems. For him, of course, only a. systems were ‘operationally closed’. A diss structure is defined in relation to energy transfer (or something like that)…I’ll have to check it out.
It is interesting because any ‘ontology’ dealing with the ‘general properties’ of objects’ (as Levi puts it) will be obliged to deal with their relations. However, what any ‘general properties’ will miss is ‘cadacualtez’ (each-onehood).
Of course, for Maturana the a. system has a ‘domain of relations’ but, as you know, they do not ‘inform’ the system – but rather ‘perturb’ it in way that is determined by its own structure…(he does flesh this out).
““De individuo non datur scientia”
How can a culture of cadacualtic persons ignore cadacualtez? Maybe a deep desire supported it, “altericide” as Lacan and Derrida put it: the hominid intraspecific violence (homo homini lupus, humans for humans are wolves, as Plauto observed – Asinaria II 4, 88 – and Francis Bacon and Hobbes reaffirmed) that simply continues the exploitation of other species (extra-specific violence) as a progress of the biospheric process, and freezes our gaze so that we see others only as competitors, pests or livestock.
Or, perhaps we are watching a reversion, an echo toward oneself, of this preexisting blindness toward cadacualtez, an echo brought on by the non-identification of wage earners with their own being. An echo, thus, triggered by considering that one may swap jobs in the same way that one’s belonging to a group, family or country could be changed – all situations being believed casual and people nomads or travellers in them. At any rate, logic was the foremost instrument in banishing others’ especial constitution – and one’s –from view and from consideration. How did this happen? (Mario Croco, Palindrome).
Thanks Paul, and yes, the distinction between dissipative structures and autopoietic ones are important (it is interesting though how Stonier would deny anything to have a purely energy transfer difference, since transfers of energy necessarily involve transfers of information, or changes in information states, given how Stonier approaches “information”)…but I can’t see how such a distinction would salvage a “phase space” identity resolution for Levi. He is far beyond even dissipative structures for he seems to be wanting to say that that such things as “It’s Britney bitch!” (that meme) and the glint in a lover’s eye also have phase spaces that define them as objects proper, and has the very deep problem of how “objecthood” would be connected to the pure and seeming dissolution of any recognizable object carried on in any “phase space” through entropy. If phase space defines the ever retreating object, we have some serious problems since the identity of such spaces surpasses anything we would regard as an object. With autopoietic structures this might seem like less a problem, but not entirely. Whether an Alzheimer’s person is the “same” person (or object) isn’t really defined by asking whether their elements occupy the same “phase space” they did 14 years ago.
D’accord. I also think that any general theory will miss something.
“How did this happen? Rational answers, as a mutual discrimination of intellectual formats, ordinarily presuppose that personhood, as proper of any individual person, might only be apprehended in general. (“Personhood” is what in the universe persons are; not to be confounded with ‘personality’, the battery of psychological links which non-human and human persons, already acting from a particular body, develop toward classes of objects.) And, rational answers assume, non datur scientia de individuo, “about individuals no science is afforded.” (Crocco).
‘ All persons are unlawful, as the facts we are considering show; but in the Platonist scheme all eclosions are worthless specimens, that is, just events that illustrate, or instance in some historical situation or moment of time, imperishable patterns of ontic possibility or transcendent Forms. This situation of a différentiel (or “difference,” à la Deleuze) serving only repetition even worsens if depicted with modern mathematical tools, in which differential equations describe dynamic evolutions whose next step solely depends on the pattern cast at the previous step. Just as with quantum physics, they cannot depict finite minds. Such depiction leaves out all eclosions and semovience, absolutely intractable in differential equations even with approaches designed to consider and highlight the role of singularities in the systemic dynamics; and reinforces the classical and less specialized tenet, the one pretending that scientia de individuo non datur.’
I apologize for the long quotes from an unpublished version of Palindrome. I was trawling frames for anything about spinoza and ‘persons’ – can you indicate any posts that engage with ‘individuals.’
As for Maturana, while looking for the dissipative comments I found, filed away, the chapter, ‘Autopoiesis, Reproduction, Heredity and Evolution,’ (in Autopoiesis, Dissipative Structures and Spontaneous Social Orders. ed. Milan Zeleny, 1980).
I could’t bear to burn what was so difficult to track down at the time – a long time ago.
Again I take the liberty of using this ‘comment’ space for a long quote of a text that many readers might not know…
Maturana:
‘Basic Notions:
We cannot escape the fact that everthing that we say, we say as observers. What we do when we attempt to provide an explanation of any given phenomenon, is to describe the conditions under which the elements that we recognize as pertaining to an other domain than the phenomena itself, would generate the phenomena. Under these circumstances, all the terms that we use must be operationally defined in order to be useful in the generation of the phenomenon to be explained (with full understanding of their domain of validity as refering to entities distinct from it).
1) Unity; An entity distinguished from its background by an observer (thru an operation of distinction) who, by specifying it as a whole, also specifies the background from which it is distinguished, constitutes a unity.
In general, existence is always the result of an operation of distinction performed by an observer, or his operational equivalen, and it is meaningless to speak of existence without specifying the operation which distinguishes that of which one asserts existence…
Examples:
If I distinguish a table as a simple unity by putting things upon it in the manner in which one does with tables, then the entity thus distinguished exists in a space in which one of the dimensions is defined by the property of supporting things [Paul. I love it], under which the circumstances in which the property of supportiveness is fully defined operationally…
I want go on except for this which would take too long to elaborate:
“A fly seen walking on a painting of Rembrandt does not interact with the painting of Rembrandt. The painting of Rembrandt exists only in the cultural space of human aesthetics, and its properties, as they define this space, cannot interplay with the properties of the walking fly. In other words, we see the fly to be bling to the painting of Rembrandt
because the painting does not exist in the domain of distinctions of the fly (see Uexkull, 1909,Umwelt und Innewelt der Tiere).’
I met M. a few times and always ended up in an argument. He really didn’t like criticism…
Again interesting that we could probably do all the philosophy we wanted with flies, rocks, tables, ‘objects’ and ‘observers.’ Strange that Piaget is hardly ever mentioned now…
As for ‘unities’ Crocco argues:
‘Unmindful foreign entities are not integral: the wholeness of such and such a kilogram of sugar or – to use Heidegger’s example – the wholeness of the Earth’s Moon, eventuate only in their observers’ mental representations, or in a integrative level of nature (the fields) where the Moon and the sugar no longer keep a particularity. Exception are the discrete increments in field excitation modes (“elementary particles”) that, independently of the physicists’ multiple mental representations purported to allude to them, occur as wholes with extramental intactness.’ (Palindrome).
Paul, I like the long quotations, and appreciate them.
Paul: “I was trawling frames for anything about spinoza and ‘persons’ – can you indicate any posts that engage with ‘individuals.’”
Kvond: Hmmm, I linked three posts in the above. I’m not sure what you are looking for. I think I have a few more, but the notion of “conjoined semiosis” may be the most productive and the most radical.
Paul: “In general, existence is always the result of an operation of distinction performed by an observer, or his operational equivalen, and it is meaningless to speak of existence without specifying the operation which distinguishes that of which one asserts existence…”
Kvond: I like this. I have been passing around an essay “Chaos, Complexity, and Entropy
A physics talk for non-physicists” by Michel Baranger, which is really the most clear writing on the subject I have read. Notably, and tantalizingly, he puts “entropy” as subjectively produced. If you would like to read it email me, but it would go a long way towards qualifying Maturana’s point about existence.
I don’t really like to reduce wholenesses of any kind to Ideal states of observation because I do feel that there are real, recursive, semiotic structures which are organized around bounds, insides and outsides, but I also feel that any such discrete description does not capture the fullness of what is possible unto such an “object”. It is pretty much for this reason that I find Graham Harman’s (and now Levi’s) appeal to the object beneath the object to be pretty much a fool’s chase. A simplified shadow cast by our largely optical analogies of consciousness and knowledge. If only the human species were born blind our philosophies may have become more interesting.
But wait there’s more:
Just for the record (in relation to Levi) Maturana and Varela argued that the first task must be ‘to point to the organization that makes a living systems a system that actively determines its invariant class identity.’
They proposed that this org. is one of ‘self-production’ (not reproduction, as you know). This had already been hinted at by Claude-Bernard, Introduction a l’etude de la medecine experimental. 1864).
Yes. As you can see in my Conjoined Semiosis post, I appeal to organizational closure as a fundamental recursion (and I would not restrict it to autopoietic structures). The problem is that Levi wants to create, at least it seems, a phase space/identity explanation of what constitutes an object, and he also wants to extend such an objecthood to all sorts of phenomena, if not every sort of phenomena. There are possibilities here I believe, but not of the confused, or vague, anagogical sort that Levi seems to be thinking of.
Hmmm, I linked three posts in the above. I’m not sure what you are looking for.
I’m trying to get a grip on Spinoza and persons & minds. I have not read him in any detail and I guess I have reduced it to a pansychism. Obviously this would be the polar opp. of finite, cadacualtic persons. But of course it does come back to definitions…
In flicking thru my 2 drawer filing cabinet I also found David Skrbina’s essay ‘Pansychism in Western Philosophy.’:
‘..the ‘idea of an object’ is to have a v. specific interpretation: it is the ‘mind’ of that object. Every mode of extension has its corresponding mind, which is its mode of thought. Since every object has a corresponding idea, every object can be said to have a mind [in italics].’
However, I’m not sure what is the definition of a Spinozist ‘object.’ – each with its own partic mode of extension and thought.
Crocco on ‘minds’
” these instruments, finite existentialities also termed minds or psyches, are
causal agencies: sinks and sources of causal action, as we will see. Thus,
like any other source of change in nature, finite existentialities or minds act
locally, and exist only “intransformatively” or within the actuality of the
physical instant. This leaves outside of minds’ reality (or minds’ ontic consistency)
the situations, unfolding in a stream of nows, whose tensiondegrading
evolution I have been recounting thus far. These situations transform
themselves independently of their being known, that is, in extramentality,
outside and apart of what finite minds are cognizant of; and thus
such tension-degrading situational evolution is counted as elapsing time. All
this concerns the carrying out of causal transformations and will be explained
below. What counts here (and biologically, too) are two features
that only minds make available for time processes.
These minds, put in this way to work as instruments in the service of
this natural process, know: minds avail themselves of a gnoseological or
cognoscitive grasp, only of the variations in their own ontic consistency –
where time does not elapse, so that those variations’s sequence does not
fade and may be made to refer to otherwise gone extramental time courses
(“past”). This means that their knowledge of their own ontic consistency is
only partial. This incompleteness comes from their being limited or finite entities,
so that they do not enact by themselves their own existence and consequently
cannot know their own enactment to be rather than not to be, a
prime ontological topic.” (Crocco, Palindrome).
Being on a quoting role I will include the following simply for the vocabulary then I will slink away.
“Psychisms are *found* in nature reciprocally extrinsic, existentially disassociated and, constitutively, not taking part in each other: constrained discrete finitudes, each fully exterior to the others without any circumincession or perichoresis; consequently, isolable (‘separable’ and ‘separability’ are synonymous with ‘local’ and ‘locality’ in an experience-situating context), each noticing different happenings and working different deeds.
Further, they are eclosions. That is, psychisms are *primarily*, or constitutively, disjunctive or parcellated.
Not *secondarily* disjunctive or parcellated, as many fungible resources are, whose parcellation often arises as a mere matter of descriptive scale; nor *unparcellated*, as it is just descriptively imposed by the probabilistic treaments.
(from A. Avila and M. Crocco, ‘Sensing: A New Fundamental Action of Nature’, Inst. for Advanced Study, Buenos Aires, 1996, page 85; italics twixt asterisks)
Paul: “However, I’m not sure what is the definition of a Spinozist ‘object.’”
Kvond: This is one of Spinoza’s defintions of an “individual”(I quoted it in the post):
“Definition: When a number of bodies of the same or different magnitude form close contact with one another through the pressure of other bodies upon them, or if they are moving at the same or different rates of speed so as to preserve an unvarying relation of movement among themselves, these bodies are said to be united with one another and all together to form one body or individual thing, which is distinguished from other things through this union of bodies. E2p13a2d”
ok, a collection of ‘bodies’ is one body’ or thing. Distinguished by this union…
So there’s a diff between a number of bodies (what are they) an individual body composed of other bodies…
this is v like Maturana’s dist in the chapter between simple and composite unities:
‘If I distinguish the table as a composite unity made of molecules…then the table, thus distinguished, exists in the space which the molecules (themselves specified operationally) define: in the physical.’
It is, for a beginner, also reminiscent of Whiteshead et al, who deny mind to aggregates but grant it to atoms – and other ‘true individuals.’
Or Leibnzi, following Bruno (I’m looking at Skrbina as I write).
Also Ruyer, with his primary true forms, (like the brain in absolute self-survey, neither geometrically close to, nor far from itself) in the concl to D&g’s What is Phil?
In fact I speculate that the concept of absolute immanence is inspired by Ruyer’s concept of survol absolue.
But returning to Spinoza, doesn’t he distinguish each of the ‘number of bodies’ composing an indiv as an ‘individual thing’?
What is the ontostatus of the bodies that form close contact thru pressure or unvarying relation of movement. I must be missing something – better get dressed.
Paul: “But returning to Spinoza, doesn’t he distinguish each of the ‘number of bodies’ composing an indiv as an ‘individual thing’?
What is the ontostatus of the bodies that form close contact thru pressure or unvarying relation of movement. I must be missing something – better get dressed.”
Kvond: What is key in Spinoza’s defintion is that the bodies “communicate” their motion and rest to each other in a fixed ratio. And yes, sub-bodies also make up bodies too. (Spinoza goes all the way down to simples, which we may regard as atoms or particles.) The communication of motion/rest (which I would regard as energy and information) is the space of the body’s organization, we might say.
Why does GH renounce FSM, our Spinozan God! FSM is real – you need only check this PHOTO: http://a.abcnews.com/images/Technology/ld_star-nosed-mole_080529_ssv.jpg
Furthermore (like some prolific bloggers) National Geographic tells us that it is “the fastest forager among mammals… with some 100,000 nerve endings … the tentacles about its nose probe up to 13 spots a second for invertebrates, insect larvae, and other prey. Then in 230 milliseconds – quicker than our eyes can flit to a flash of light – the mole scrutinizes and devours the edibles”. Talk about conjoined semiosis..
Oh while I’m here: On your reply to IMMANENCE, K, you gave “a negating nod to Peirce and Bateson”. I didn’t want to go off-topic there but what exactly is a “negating nod”? (Most of the difficulties I have with philosophy involve the use of negation ; ) At the time my Indian coworker first arrived here, she would shake her head sideways when she meant ‘yes’. She soon learned to bobble-head like the best of us, but I think I enjoyed the Indian gesture more. Or, those of my Russian coworker, whose head movements seem to continually weave a figure-8 of infinity. This observation makes sense now when I recall Pavel Palazchenko’s “The Many Possibilities of the Russian Negative” in the RUSSIA NOW Post supplement of 2009-08-26 (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/advertisers/russia/articles/opinion/20090826/the_many_possibilities_of_the_russian_negative.html) “Rather than being a flat negation, ‘ne’ can make things rather vague… There are many ways of saying ‘take it easy’ in Russian – and there is a ‘ne’ in practically all of them” (BTW, you were doing OODA loops at the time ; )
Mark,
(nice to have you back)
I have always loved the starnosed mole. Thank you for him. The photo is wonderful!
Mark: “Oh while I’m here: On your reply to IMMANENCE, K, you gave “a negating nod to Peirce and Bateson”. I didn’t want to go off-topic there but what exactly is a “negating nod”?”
Kvond: There are a few things here. Firstly, I originally wrote “with a nod to Peirce and Bateson” but then I realized that people probably would not realize that the “nod” here is a negation, so I thought to turn it into an oxymoron. The actual reason for this is because Levi has been fast and fancy with Bateson, and borrowed/stolen from him repeatedly with the “difference that makes a difference” principle. So, oxomoronically, Levi is perfoming a negating nod to Bateson. I thoroughly doubted whether anyone would pick this up, or even the oxomoronic nature of my trope, but there you go, you caught the whiff of it.
Further, there is also the “nod” of the drug-induced, as they nod off, which seems to be something of the nod that Levi performs when trying to catch hold of Graham’s imaginary coat tails (I loved him pleading to be included in the Speculative Realism wikipedia entry last week! Come on now, edit it yourself). In my mind Levi is caught in some rather profound self-contraditions as he is torn this way and that. Only a few months ago he was going on how the object in retreat from its interactions was meaningless, now it is the crowning and distinguishing feature of his philosophy —
Mark: “(BTW, you were doing OODA loops at the time ; )”
Kvond: I’m still working on the Boyd article, and it may have to wait until a book arrives that seems central. Osinga’s title seems to be the definitive work on Boyd, and I sense that I really want to ground myself in his miltary strategies in order to bring out the best in the OODA.