Skip to main content

Desire beyond the pale (or virtuality and the extensive continuum)

The image of feuds and government contention is a good one to consider the virtual (and the contingent). Governments operate within borders, they are devices of limited scope and they make use of centrifugal and centripetal forces. Governments are unable to flee from internal rebellion as their focus are within their department - inside their feud. They have to engage in diplomacy (or external war) in order to do so. They craft alliances with outer governments whose governed areas overlap with their feuds. There is no government that is fully alien to a government area - to assemble a working machine among governed cogs, one needs virtual collaborators.

Nick Land, in Machinic Desire, presents Anti-Oedipus´ desiring machines as if they promoted an industrial revolution in process philosophy. No cosmos but a technocosmos where everything is production. The socius acts as a self-preserving machinery that reproduces instead of replicating by trying to be isolated from the forces of the virtual - of the rest of the world. Land brings up Freud´s image that a nervous system attempts to be eliminate all stimuli from outside to picture the socius with its Oedipian devices that turn the unfamiliar into family. The Oedipus operation is already an operation of alienating the virtual (in previous posts I have toyed with the idea that what is contingent is contingent to the virtual and depends on the rest of the world). The Oedipus operation turns family into a necessity by decoupling it from the rest of the world. It produces necessity by enforcing a skin - macropods, Land´s term - to keep the rest of the world out or filtered. It is a reproducing machine that keeps the world out by coding it all into the family figures. The Oedipus turns desire itself into a macropod force, turns interaction with the world into a closed circuit in a centripetal direction.

The virtual, thought in terms of the rest of the world affecting something as an assemblage of parts and therefore as the material for contingency, makes for an interesting contrast with the potential. Consider dispositional properties like solubility. Sugar is soluble in water. That means that it will dissolve provided that the rest of the world offers the good conditions. The conditions for something to be actualized are virtual (this is the central difficulty for ordinary conditional analyses of dispositions). It is a contingent matter of fact that the sugar dissolves, to talk about potentialities or dispositionals is to make something independent of the rest of the world (i.e. the solubility). Those blocks of independence - of closed circuitry - are like Ceteris Paribus Devices (as Manuel and me used to call them) or, rather, like black boxes. They have to do with laws of nature and, to use Cartwright classical phrase, their lies: they hold only in lab conditions when the virtual is isolated.

The Oedipus device is likewise. It creates potentials and necessities by isolating the external world from the family circuitry of desire. It operates by short circuiting the unconscious in a way that it reproduces its relation to the rest of the world, to the productive technocosmos. In fact, the unconscious in this way is like the extensive continuum of Whitehead (see previous posts where I compare it with the plan d´immanence). The extensive continuum is open to be prehended by any actual entity. It can be thought (unconsciously) in an indefinite variety of ways. But the Oedipus device enforces one circuitry. It reinforces a network of individuated and familiar actual entities. (This is why the sanctioned discourses on sexuality are so full of dispositionals...)


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

Talk on ultrametaphysics

 This is the text of my seminar on ultrametaphysics on Friday here in Albuquerque. An attempt at a history of ultrametaphysics in five chapters Hilan Bensusan I begin with some of the words in the title. First, ‘ultrametaphysics’, then ‘history’ and ‘chapters’. ‘Ultrametaphysics’, which I discovered that in my mouth could sound like ‘ autre metaphysics’, intends to address what comes after metaphysics assuming that metaphysics is an endeavor – or an epoch, or a project, or an activity – that reaches an end, perhaps because it is consolidated, perhaps because it has reached its own limits, perhaps because it is accomplished, perhaps because it is misconceived. In this sense, other names could apply, first of all, ‘meta-metaphysics’ – that alludes to metaphysics coming after physics, the books of Aristotle that came after Physics , or the task that follows the attention to φύσις, or still what can be reached only if the nature of things is considered. ‘Meta-m

Memory assemblages

My talk here at Burque last winter I want to start by thanking you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory, immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the future. In this talk, I will try to elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by saying that I