Friday, June 7, 2013

Swallow it down, that jagged little (nondual) pill

Continuing from this post (and its predecessor), a number of quotes to highlight what I mean by this new level of integration on ladders and webs. And how webs (or networks) so construed are not a dichotomous opposite equal to ladders in this postmetaphysical form of nonduality.

From this post, quoting DeLanda in The Speculative Turn:

"The terms ‘linear’ and ‘nonlinear’ are not a dichotomy. Rather than being a unique opposite, nonlinear patterns represent a variety of possibilities of which the linear case is but a limiting case" (383).

And from this post, quoting DeLanda in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy:

"A Deleuzian multiplicity takes as its first defining feature these two traits of a manifold: its variable number of dimensions and, more importantly, the absence of a supplementary (higher) dimension imposing an extrinsic coordinatization, and hence, an extrinsically defined unity. As Deleuze writes: 'Multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organization belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system'" (12-13).



And this post from Polydoxy, quoting Deleuze:

"A multiplicity certainly contains points of unification, centers of totalization, points of subjectivation, but these are factors that can prevent its growth and stop its lines. These factors are in the multiplicity they belong to, not the reverse" (2).

And this post quoting Faber’s referenced paper: 

Deleuze deeply honored Whitehead, and precisely because of the...appreciation of the unconquerable wildness of openended becoming over against any systematic derivation of multiplicity from hierarchical unity…. In a rhizomatic world of infinite differentiations and interrelations, unity always appears as finite unification of multiple relations. Nothing is fixed; nothing is perfect; nothing is forever. The metaphor of the rhizome frees our mind from false unifications that defy multiplicity and, as a political category, empowers resistance against oppressive unifications of hierarchies. 

And as I summarized in this post:

To put the above in language that Bonnie (and Tom) use, there is indeed an asymmetric relation between unity and multiplicity, with the latter being ground instead of the other way around. And of course multiplicty isn't just one side of a one-many pole, as that sort of framing only comes from the formal, hierarchical thinking inherent to unifiers. As stated previously, multiplicity (aka khora or differance to me) is the (an)hierarchic ground within which oppositions take form. Or put in DeLanda's terms above, multiplicity is the undifferentiated (withdrawn) virtual from which oppositions arise in the differentiated actual. And the virtual is embodied, immanent, without essence. I know, a tough, acerbic pill to swallow for a holist. Perhaps take Alanis Morissette's advice and swallow it down? If so you just might, as she says, learn.

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