Skip to main content

Stereoscopy (or perception and reference)

At least since Aquinas - and it is an Aristotelian idea - the object of perception is taken to be dual, usually because the intellect perceives as much as the senses - or maybe perceives something out of what the senses perceive. Id quo and id quod: what is seen in what I see (or rather, what I see in what is seen...). Locke's idea was to bring stereoscopy to the very nature of perception - the object of perception alone is stereoscopical. Whitehead's diagnosis was that no one lived up to this message and the object started with Locke himself to be disassembled into deliverances of the senses and the workings of the intellect. This was, in a sense, a reactionary move where Locke's message was put aside. The message was that perceptual representation is by nature two-fold - affordances and creation, sensual and real objects in Harman. Maybe it helps to think of the photograph model diagnosed in the direct reference theorists by Evans (in Varieties of Reference): no matter what the subjective form (or sensual object, or image in the Cartesian theater)looks like, it is an image of the objective datum (or the object out there, or the real object). To perceive is maybe like to refer (in a direct theory account): it matters what is perceived. However, Whitehead would add that it also matters the image (the description) we make of what is perceived. These image constitute what is perceived. It is as if the reference was no more than what the descriptions point at and yet the descriptions were somehow irrelevant in the very act of referring.

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