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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.
Thanks for your words, Kevin 🙂
Of course, this has a lot to do with intellectual honesty and with the ability to make helpful epistemological ruptures in respect to what we sooner or later presume to be our ‘work’. But mostly with the practical ways we all have to approximate to what we shall understand as our ‘object’ of study. Bourdieu never got tired to insist in this kind of professional reflexivité. I am just trying to wield a bit of his ‘common sense’ here, as i think it is the least thing i can do against Latour`s cynical imposture.
And thank you for your lengthy, thought-out comment on Latour and Bourdieu. I was quite happy to repost it. As far as intellectual honesty goes, I think that Harman is very sincere in his embrace of Latour, as Latour’s object-world allows him a kind of locus for his Husserlian fantasy of sensous representations. It is just that Harman’s lack of concern for the social, political consequences (or sources) for his metaphysics, “My word, I’m doing ONTOLOGY, ontology, don’t you get it! Just like the scientist does science!”, IS his blind spot. While for someone like Levi who likes to parade as a social justice fellow and incriminate anyone who criticizes him as a Nazi, this inherited blind-spot from Latour, does compose a certain kind of lack of intellectual honesty, or at least self-investigation. When one pretends that having one’s metaphysics associated with Neoliberalism is the equivalent of being called a Nazi (Reid Kane of course made the mistake of making the association between Levi Bryant and Neoliberalism), one would think that one would take stock of one’s theories a bit better, and at the very least position oneself to the divide between Latour and Bourdieu, exactly on this issue.
Then again, Levi is a very haphazard thinker, and rather likes to create the impressions of a “position” or a depth of thinking and analysis. It is just in this vein perhaps that he imagined that Marx was an Objectologist, or a Latourian, one imagines. Watching Levi change positions in relation to his Lacanianism is like watching Oedipus struggle with his father at the cross-roads. Less than interesting once you realize how its all going to end.
Yeah, i do think that Harman is too honest regarding to his work and with his lack of interest of the social, so blindly honest that he just ends up to reify his rampant naivety. But still this is just a superficial justification that its not acceptable at the end of the day. Yes, he thinks he is doing ontology, but he just wants to avoid the fact that ontology is also a political issue. However, I elsewhere wielded to Levi a rude bourdieusian frontal comment against what he was defending regarding to the distinction between the questions of politics and the questions of ontology. A comment that of course he was not brave enough to publish on his blog: http://is.gd/5000C
There i explain how naive is to think that such distinction is an absolute one. There i even bring Heidegger`s historical case, so to demonstrate how the questions of politics do have a lot to do with the questions of ontology. The irony is that i exemplify such case using Bourdieu`s little book on the political ontology of Heidegger, which is meant to demonstrate how Heidegger worked out his idea of ontology to institutionalize his political fascist tendencies in order to construct and reinforce the refractive illusion of an absolute autonomy of the philosophical field. Of course we can perfectly endorse and extend such comment to Harman`s naivety.
I hope you don’t mind but I inserted the worthwhile critique’s link back into the body of my post, because the point is quite important. Levi of course has deleted any number of such sincere attempts to engage his so-called “philosophy” (who knows how many other person’s objections have been deleted). Only those who have experienced understand this. I recall once after my contradictory point had been removed, he then said something like, “All great questions asked by everyone yesterday” leaving the impression that his position was the result of answering all objections. Frankly, on a small scale, this is Fascist image-making, exactly the kind of false image of the absence of contradiction that drives totalitarian society. That it happens on the small scale, in the mouth of a so-self-styled Marxist, well, what can one say?
As for the substance of your point, I don’t think that Heidegger’s Nazism is a mere “accident” of the “essence” of his metaphysics. People get all twisted over this, as if we are being SO unfair in drawing lines from the life lived and the metaphysics imagined, as if the metaphysics was not in some way justifying the life lived, as least with SOME critical value.
Is it preposterous that I find Harman to be quite Orientalizing, something that has Colonialist ramifications, and the coincidence that Harman lives as an All-American mid-western fellow in Egypt, of all places, a place with a history of all kind of Western fantasy and colonialist difficulties? Does it matter that Harman Orientalizes Egypt in his descriptions of it, making the exotic come out everywhere? Why would someone NOT make this connnection? Harman leaves its breadcrumbs everywhere. This is not so say that he is a bad fellow for indulging in this Exoticism of Egypt, but that his metaphysics, especially as it itself is an Orientalizing picture of the world (self-admitted by Harman), begs to be considered in this context.
Of course i don`t mind 🙂
As to the connection between ontology and politics that Levi tries to carry out, the guy is horribly consistant on this. He likes to invokes the so-called “Epistemological Fallacy” (the name of the term is rhetorically designed to stop criticism and argument, “oh, I’m committing a fallacy, how foolish of me”). On the other hand when we were in discussion and more friendly, and Levi was on something of a Spinoza kick (he changes influences ever 20 minutes), I pointed out to him that this fallacy has no foundation from a Spinozist point of view. Because ever epistemological change is an ontological one (and vise versa), Spinoza wrote a metaphysics which was titled an “Ethics” with very strong political dimension. Levi completely agreed with my point, and only conceded that this was something he was working on. Well he stopped working on it, and just went back to invoking his imagined fallacy in the same shallow way, always taking the opportunity to degress into well-rehersed explications of other positions. Sigh. So it goes with Levi. Trying to get coherence out of him is a rabbit hole.
Now Spinoza argument of the coincidence of Ontology and epistemology is not the same as Bourdieu’s politicization of the ontological. Personally I would like to Spinozify Bourdieu and take him out of some of his reflexive contraditions that Schinkel points out (from the Latourian perspective). And Spinoza’s answer to truth also points out just what is missing from the Flatness of Latour’s ontology, so I have important work to do in fleshing out the verticality necessary to Latour found in the ontological change that occurs in the increase knowledge of causes. In any case though, whether from a Spinozist or Bourdieuian perspective, I completely disagree that the political and the ontological are divorced.
In fact, in respect to all this situation, Bourdieu even take into account Spinoza`s Politico-Theological Treatise to recommend it to the philosophical hermeneutists adepts as a program that founds (I`m translating here) a truthful science of the cultural oevres, a program that promotes the rupture of the ritual embalmment that endorses any textual canonization, in order to put such oevres into an historical investigation, that shall determine (paraphrasing Bourdieu quote on Spinoza): “not only the life and the habits of the author that wrote it, in which epoch, and for who and with which language such oevre was written, but also to determine in which hands such oevre fell into, who decide admitted it as canonic, etc…”
This all can be read in Bourdieu`s most sober philosophical book, his Pascalien Meditations, specially a chapter entitled “The critique of the scholastic reason”, where he states his famous “radical doubt radicalized” procedure. Something to enjoy http://is.gd/503at 🙂
Most helpful on Bourdieu and Spinoza. Very much so.