Skip to main content

Urges and virtuality

The notion of attractor - associated to vector fields - is a central element of the way Delanda presents Deleuze's virtuality. In fact, it is a central element to be considered in a process ontology: actual entities create fields of attraction that would have something to do, I believe, with what Whitehead calls nexus. Attractors guide trajectories - this guiding would entail some sort of instantiation only if the rest of the world is subtracted. Virtuality has to do with the rest of the world - just like any synthetic a posteriori judgment can be taken to be virtual because it depends on the rest of the world. The pattern, of course, is familiar to process philosophers: to bring to ontology what is presented as an epistemological feature. (Contrast this
with some kinds of anti-realist move that would do the opposite movement.) Here, modeling can fail to be implemented because it points at the virtual - at attractors - and therefore predictions can fail. Other parts of the world can interfere. Virtuality is about attraction. What I have once called (in collaborative works both with Manuel and Tomas) a ceteris paribus device - roughly the lie brought up by a law of physics concocted in a lab - is virtual. Models, in general, can be thought as attractors and not as mental projections.

I was thinking of urges in terms of constitutive elements of the world. Urges are pressure points - the subsistence of anything (a community, a society of molecules, a population or a middle-sized object) depends on variables in the ecology of urges. An urge can be resisted and can be countered, but such maneuver involve deviating from an attractor. Sometimes an urge is created (producing economic catastrophes like shocks in the sense of Naomi Klein would be an example) so that other urges subsume or get diluted. The idea here is that urges can fight with other urges - urges claim their hold on trajectories, on what occurs. To change the world is not to change trajectories, but to change attractors and if it is so, it is to act on urges. Make something become urgent. Surely, the effect of urges would depend on the rest of the world - the other urges. Urges are virtual. They shape things by acting on the space of attractors. But can an ontology of urges be lean enough to claim that all attractors are, somehow and at the end of the day, urges?

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
1 comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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. ‘Me...
Post a Comment
Read more