Skip to main content

Contingency as the plural of necessity

One of the thesis I like in my upcoming book Being Up for Grabs (BUG) is that the plural of necessity is contingency. Plural as in singulars that accumulate. I'm watching wildlife docs and wondering how different felines lions and cheetahs as territorial animals interact. I also think of fleeing and mating, two governing forces that interact. There is a land that is not under the control of either lions or cheetahs, this is where disputes take place - polemos, auseinandersetzung. It is up for grabs how an animal would behave if both mating and feeing are pressing it. The idea is that either there is an over-arching necessity or force, or there is some kind of plane of accidents.

A bit in the end of BUG:
We can understand that the relation is one where one is the plural of the other; namely, contingency is the plural of necessity. Or rather, contingency emerges from the plurality of necessities. Whenever there is genuinely more than one necessity – and not an ultimate overarching necessity ruling over all others – there is contingency. If we have, say, an irreducible physical necessity and an irreducible psychological necessity, there is a grey area of intersection between these necessities. Physical laws and psychological laws are such that they have to interact somewhere. Analogously, if there is more than one government, there is an an-arché area between them.

This is explained in different ways in BUG. It comes down to smaller and smaller forces and necessity. If there are small necessities, in the plural, there are an-arché areas.

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

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" .  
Post a Comment
Read more