Skip to main content

Oriented metaphysics

Been thinking a bit about orientation, inspired by Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology. Orientation is maybe a very interesting idea to import from phenomenology as there is no composition without orientation. In fact, the very notion of home (and the alien) is central to debunk a view from nowhere: there is no view without orientation - that is not blind, or mute... Orientation is provided by forms like space and time or by concepts that would allow us to recognise the traces of our pets or the smell of our workplace. But orientation is not concept-driven. (Yet, it is not enough to provide full-fledged content). Ticks, mammals, trees, salt, planets, train tracks and fire have orientation. It is, also, a way to think of the double modes of existence of properties (or features, or affordances) suspected by C. B. Martin: dispositional and categorical, functional and manifest. Something can be oriented towards a squared wood surface either as a categorical square or as a component for a fitting table.

In fact, orientation is related to directedness, what Molnar sees in intentionality. But it generalises the idea somehow. And provides a way to put together indexicality and perspectives (or dispositions, thought in terms of intentionality): Perry's essential indexical is the irreducible orientation. If all thought is de re, all thought is crucially and irreducibly oriented (or orientated). To think of oriented objects is to think about de re objects: like me, like here, like hot, like liquid. It is an ontology of neighbourhoods: anything is a bundle of its neighbours. This is maybe what interests me: an ecological element to everything, what always responds to their surroundings throughout. Relations of neighbourhood (contact, contagion, immanence) are the origin of any causal power - and this is how I am somehow attracted by occasionalist attempts to vindicate some mitigated form of actualism.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dismantling absolute contingency

I´ve been wondering about whether we can formulate something about contingency along the lines of a principle of irreduction: aucune chose n´est par elle-même contingent ou necessaire . The principle asserts that necessity is always contingent on underlying fixed things: something is physically necessary (or contingent) given the fixed laws of nature, something is deontically contingent - allowed - or necessary - mandatory - given the fixed ethical rules (or laws of the land). Finally, something is logically necessary (or necessary simpliciter) given a fixed logic. The irreducible diversity of ethical rules, the absence of eternal laws of nature and the plurality of logical systems, if accepted, makes necessity relative to those parameters. An aggiornamento of Heraclitus would have that nothing is necessary comes what may. Surely, of couse, if there is no absolute necessity, there is no absolute contingency. We can then say that in a broader, more abstract level, things are up for grab...
6 comments
Read more

Necropolitics and Neocameralism

It is perhaps just wishful thinking that the alt-right seemingly innovative and intrepid ideas will disappear from the scene as Trump's reign comes to an end. They have their own dynamics, but certainly the experiences of the last years, including those in the pandemics, do help to wear off their bright and attractiveness. Neocameralism, what Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land with him ushered in as a model of post-democracy that relinquish important ingredients of the human security system, is one of these projects that is proving to be too grounded in the past to have any capacity to foretell anything bright beyond the democratic rusting institutions. It is little more than necropolitics - which is itself a current post-democratic alternative. Achile Mbembe finds necropolitics in the regimes were warlords take over the state-like institutions (or mimick them)  to rule on the grounds of local security having no troubles killing or letting die whoever is in their path. Neocameralism pos...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Cathedral and the axiomatics of capital

Today in my Cosmopolitics of Capital class, instead of discussing Lyotard´s evil book in connection to Moldbug and Land´s ideas, as planned, we spent hours considering bits of The Anti-Oedipus under the light of Neo-cameralist ideas and some remarks Land makes about the horror that is often triggered as an emotional response to (Neo-cameralist) statements about the Cathedral. We concentrated on the bit of chapter 3, section 10 where Deleuze and Guattari talk about class struggle and the bourgeoisie as a class eroder. There they describe how capitalism decodes the flows of castes, orders, and classes in the sense of feudal aristocracy, serfdom and peasantry. The erosion affects also the proletariat that is never associated with a specific job or type of service but rather a decoded abstract worker. This decoding is precisely what makes the proletariat universal and directly linked with the productive forces - which means, for Deleuze and Guattari, that they are potentially the schizo, ...
Post a Comment
Read more