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November 5 - December 19, 2021
Any ‘theory of everything’ that dismisses the reality of fictions, or passes them over in silence, is by that fact alone unable to reach its goal of covering everything.
Good summary
My response is that OOO means ‘object’ in an unusually wide sense: an object is anything that cannot be entirely reduced either to the components of which it is made or to the effects that it has on other things.
distractedness of the reader. The successful metaphor, much like the successful joke, will occur only when the reader or auditor is sincerely deployed in living it. The metaphor is not histrionic, a word we can reserve for theatrical behaviour in the narrowly showboating or attention-getting sense. Instead, the metaphor is theatrical in the same sense in which living one’s role on stage is theatrical.
Latour’s answer to both of these groups is to suggest that human nature is somewhat beside the point, since humans are just one of many actors in the political network. Whether or not you think
The concluding value of this exercise was to show that all four families of political theory are wrong: both because they claim a non-existent political knowledge, and because their conception of politics has too much to do with human beings and too little to do with everything else.
The notion of a fourfold structure of things was an idea floated by Heidegger in his 1949 lecture ‘Insight Into That Which Is’, though in such an obscure poetic form – earth, sky, gods, mortals – that even his most loyal disciples have made little headway with the concept.
Sounds Pythagorean,further reading.
Yet the fact remains that Donald Trump does not live in my perception of the White House, but inside the White House itself – however badly I wish this were only happening in my mind. By the same token, what burns is a flame, rather than our perception of the flame. More than this, some of the objects of experience simply do not exist, including hallucinations, dreams, and the non-existent objects of our most groundless anxieties.
We can invoke knowledge against Trump’s deceptions and evasions, but only insofar as we adopt a new definition of knowledge that incorporates elusive real qualities rather than directly masterable sensual ones.
None of us can point to an instrument that clearly displays global warming or the world refugee crisis on a luminous screen, as patent truths that compel specific strategies for dealing with these issues. What we can do, however, is hold the Trumps of the world accountable for taking no account of reality, by which I mean the genuine disturbances in our world that indicate that climate and refugee problems must somehow be incorporated into the body politic.
Whilst I agree, surely the sensual objects that followers of such men hold dear overide any effort at accountability, no matter how it is presented.
Timothy Morton
Fol!ow up
As the role of inanimate objects in philosophy continues to increase, we might expect Latour to replace Foucault at some point as the standard default reference in the humanities and social sciences: by which I mean someone cited repeatedly even by those who have never read him.
Ian Bogost
Acquire
more recent Play Anything. Bogost’s
The point is not that self-awareness has no value, because of course it does. The point is that ironic detachment from one’s own views and even one’s own life has, through the joint workings of postmodern theory and pop culture, become a miserable cliché: an idea once but no longer liberating. We are now awash in what Bogost – by analogy with paranoia – calls ‘ironoia’, defined as follows: ‘If paranoia is the mistrust of people, ironoia is the mistrust of things … Zooming out a level with irony is far easier than reconciling the conflict between sincerity and disdain, so as to reconnect with
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Irony and consumer saturation.
Some readers might actually prefer to begin their reading of Form and Object with Book II, especially those who lack formal training in philosophy.
Edeavor tp acquire
