“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, December 20, 2010

Processes as Hyperobjects

Levi Bryant, stalwart plunger of his brain into texts of all kinds, has been making some excellent discoveries about hyperobjects.

If I may offer a summary here, it's simply that processes and emergent phenomena of various kinds may be seen as hyperobjects.

Just for fun let's think of some really large scale potential hyperobjects that would fit the bill. These might include objects that appear to be sets of things. Hence "universe," "evolution," "capitalism," "space-time" might better be seen this way.

Why? It gets us out of the idealism latent in process and emergence thinking. Who gets to SEE the process etc as a process? There's a latent correlationism in seeing evolution as a human label for a process. This provides a narrow window for creationism.

Or the idealism of Badiou: if it's a hyperobject it's not me who counts "universe" as one.

With a more clear idea that processes are real objects, we can easily apply De Landa's criteria for realness, as Levi has been doing.

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