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Articles
Tractatus Mathematico-Polticus
Editors
Michael Austin
Paul J. Ennis
Fabio Gironi
Thomas Gokey
Christopher Norris
isbn 978-1-257-65407-9
Cover Image: Photograph of the Sanzhi ufo houses by cypherone
From Wikipedia: The ufo houses were constructed beginning in 1978.
They were intended as a vacation resort in a part of the northern coast
adjacent to Danshui, and were marketed towards U.S. military oicers coming from their East Asian postings. However, the project was abandoned
in 1980 due to investment losses and several car accident deaths during
construction, which is said to have been caused by the unfortuitous act of
bisecting the Chinese dragon sculpture located near the resort gates for
widening the road to the buildings.
Designed by Thomas Gokey
v 1.0
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Robert Jackson
he Cubist Object
169
Hilan Bensusan
Correlationism reconsidered
187
Josef Moshe
2011
Sublme Objects
Timothy Morton
207
Unknowng Anmals
Nicola Masciandaro
228
Edtorial Introduction
Networkoloies
A Manifesto, Section II
Christopher Vitale
275
Grls Welcome!!!
Speculatve Realism, Object Oriented Ontology and Queer heoy
Michael ORourke
313
Fabio Gironi
Book Reviews
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Speculations II
the speculative materialist occupying the positions of the
dogmatic Christian and the dogmatic atheist; the correlationist would then point out not that theory is incapable
of privileging one eventualiy [my emphasis] over another,16
but that theory is incapable of privileging one theoy over
another. The subjective idealists rejoinder could then amount
to nothing more than a tiresome reiteration of the primacy
of correlation and this would be followed by an equally tiresome reairmation, by the speculative materialist, of the
primacy of facticity. The correlationist, confronted now not
with a vague mixture of irst order and second order claims,
but with a clean-cut aporia, would not need to airm the possibility of the truth of the subjective idealists thesis, nor that
of the truth of the speculative materialists thesis: rather than
saying that either one of these theses could be true, he would
be able to say, quite simply, that one of these theses must be
true if the other is false. Meillassoux has unveiled the falsehood of speculative idealism as the absolute condition for
the truth of speculative materialism and the falsehood of the
later as the absolute condition for the formers truth. What
this means is that, from now on, any theory that explicitly
disallows its own radicalization in one of these two directions, may legitimately be reduced in the other direction.
However, it does not imply anything for a theory that ignores
the speculative coordinates altogether and leaves these possibilities, qua possibility-of-ignorance, open. Such a theory
is not deined by the vertical axis of speculation, but by the
horizontal axis of interpretation. If the intersection of these
axes is where truth and meaning meet, the acceptance of the
possibility-of-ignorance would seem to be a necessary condition for any questioning of the meaning of truth.
16
Sublme Objects
Timothy Morton
University of California, Davis
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207
Speculations II
208
The linguist John Lawler has compiled an archive of research in this ield,
called phonosemantics, at htp://w-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/.
5
6
Roman Jakobson, Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics, in Syle
in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 350377.
7
See Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Poety, Language,
hought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 1587.
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Speculations II
8
I borrow the term directive from Alphonso Lingis, he Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 7175.
210
A Rhetorical Question
We could rewrite the whole of rhetoric as object-oriented
by reversing the implicit order of Aristotles ive parts of rhetoric.
Instead of starting with invention and proceeding through
disposition to elocution, then on to memory and delivery, we
should start with delivey. Delivery is precisely the physicality
of your rhema, your speech. Demosthenes used to practice his
delivery by illing his mouth with pebbles and walking uphill.
Pebbles and hills played a part in Demosthenes rhetoric. But
well see that rhetoric is far more concerned with nonhuman
entities than that.
9
See Don Abbot, Kant, Theremin, and the Morality of Rhetoric, Philosophy
and Rhetoric 40:3 (2007): 27492.
Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: Re.Press, 2009), 16385.
10
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Speculations II
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 11.3. This fourth part of the Loeb Classical
Library edition of Quintilian is not readily available in hard copy, but an
online version can be found at at htp://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/
Roman/Texts/Quintilian/Institutio_Oratoria/11C*.html#3.
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13
Ibid., 11.3.
14
Graham Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpenty
of hings (Chicago: Open Court, 2005), 14244, 17282.
Ibid., 162.
17
Ibid., 11.3.
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20
214
22
Henry George Liddell and Robert Scot, A Greek-English Lexicon: Revised and
Augmented throughout by Sir Heny Stuart Jones with the Assistance of Roderick
McKenzie (Oxford. Clarendon Press, 1940), .
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A Speculative Sublime
According to OOO, objects all have four aspects. They withdraw
from access by other objects. They appear to other objects.
They are speciic entities. And thats not all: they really exist.
Aesthetically, then, objects are uncanny beasts. If they were
pieces of music, they might be some impossible combination
of slapstick sound efects, Sui singing, Mahler and hardcore
techno. If they were literature, they might exist somewhere
between The Commedia Dell Arte, he Cloud of Unknowing,
War and Peace and Waiting for Godot. Pierrot Lunaire might
be a good metaphor for grotesque, frightening, hilarious,
sublime objects.
The object-oriented sublime doesnt come from some
beyond, because this beyond turns out to be a kind of optical illusion of correlationism. Theres nothing underneath
the Universe of objects. Or not even nothing, if you prefer
thinking it that way. The sublime resides in particularity, not
in some distant beyond. And the sublime is generalizable
to all objects, insofar as they are all what Ive called strange
strangers, that is, alien to themselves and to one another in
an irreducible way.26
Of the two dominant theories of the sublime, we have a
Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics, 172.
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25
26
216
27
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiy into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
and the Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 5770.
28
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis:
Hacket, 1987), 1036.
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Speculations II
Therefore, when we call the sight of the starry sky sublime, we must
not base our judgment upon any concepts of worlds that are inhabited by rational beings, and then [conceive of] the bright dots that we
see occupying the space above us as being these worlds suns, moved
in orbits prescribed for them with great purposiveness; but we must
base our judgment regarding merely on how we see it, as a vast vault
encompassing everything, and merely under this presentation may
we posit the sublimity that a pure aesthetic judgment atributes to
this object. In the same way, when we judge the sight of the ocean
we must not do so on the basis of how we think, it, enriched with all
sorts of knowledge which we possess (but which is not contained in
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pyramids one must neither get too close to them nor stay too far away.
For if one stays too far away, then the apprehended parts (the stones
Ibid., 113.
Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature ater Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006) and Ben Woodard, Slime Dynamics (forthcoming with Zer0
books).
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Speculations II
on top of one another) are presented only obscurely, and hence their
presentation has no efect on the subjects aesthetic judgment; and if
one gets too close, then the eye needs some time to complete the apprehension from the base to the peak, but during that time some of
the earlier parts are invariably extinguished in the imagination before
it has apprehended the later ones, and hence the comprehension is
never complete.33
33
34
220
35
Longinus, On the Sublime in Classical Literay Criticism trans. T.S. Dorsch
(London: Penguin, 1984), 109.
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Speculations II
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39
Ibid. 121.
38
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: he Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), 6697.
222
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Speculations II
Longinus, On the Sublime, 116, 117; Doctor Seuss, he Lorax (New York:
Random House, 1971), 49.
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Speculations II
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