Skip to main content

Laws and realontologie

I draw from Latour a slogan about how to conceive ontology from the point of view of politics: look at the realpolitik. It is as we were invited to look at a realontologie, something that goes beyond laws and principles while taking them as part of the landscape.Interestingly, von Rochau, who created the term realpolitik defines it as focused on: "the powers that shape, maintain and alter the state [a]s the basis of all political insight" and that it "leads to the understanding that the law of power governs the world of states just as the law of gravity governs the physical world". Ontology is not about the execution of general principles or the instantiation of laws but rather it is about what is made to generate, discard and circumvent these laws. Latour talks about the practice of the real politicians, how they do their petty negotiations in parliament, in think tanks, in lobbying institution and inside palaces. They knit a network of agreements that range from their personal interests to what they need to achieve for those they represent - which interact in a complex allagmatics as there is no once and for all given representative mandate to anyone. They have to act as a network without ever being sure that they are not going to be stripped off all their allies and left on their own as a minimal agent, isolated from previous strengthening power. The same with actual entities and laws of nature: no natural law persists without entities reinforcing it. There is nothing to be instantiated without its instances. Laws are ceteris paribus because they work only if we assume entities will carry on as they have been - but they are virtual because no repetition brings in no difference. Whitehead has that natural laws are such because they depend on a cosmic epoch. That water is H2O is true in every cosmic epoch where there is water - but natural kinds are themselves dependent on cosmic epochs.

The idea that truth is an agreement between sponsors, such as I maintain in this post
can be understood in line with realontologie. Truth is not self-maintained; it is not like a constitution, it is more like jurisprudence, more like the real dealing with laws that lawyers and other contract-mongers make and break. Natural laws are not themselves true because they are no more than part of a framework where truth takes place. Truth belongs in the realm of all the petty negotiations of all real actual entities. Laws lie - but they help understanding the routes of the many leveks of negotiation that makes something true.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...

Memory Assemblages out!

  Memory Assemblages is out at Bloomsbury This is the book I wrote during most of 22 and 23. It proposes a spectral realism based on the idea that archives are ubiquitous - I call this pan-mnemism. It offers a conception of how memory related deeply with persistent addition of new events, thoughts and circumstances and this addends concoct varying assemblages of what is retained and what brings this archives to the fore. It also rejects the idea that there is an archeology to the archive - or an ontology to hauntology. Even if it boils down merely to postulate traces or forms. I have neglected this blog for a while and I don't expect myself to be very much back to it soon. But I will talk about the book in my youtube channel, in an English language playlist called "On Memory Assemblages" .  

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...