“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


Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Autopoesis or Smoke and Mirrors

It's elementary to see how autopoesis is a smoke-and-mirrors exercise. For a Spencer-Brown style mark to exist, there has already got to be an inscribable surface. There is no auto, then, to do any poesis. There is already a system of meaningfulness in place.

This inscribable surface, in nuce, is Derrida's arche-writing.

Better then to start with this—there is NO NATURE, not even an autopoetic one.

What we then have, if we want to posit something (which I do) is an infinite regress possibility, or as Graham Harman says, objects wrapped in objects wrapped in objects...so be it.

The mad dash towards emergence is, at least in the humanities, a regression back away from deconstruction, while OOO moves past it.

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