It has without doubt been the worst allergy season of my entire life. Twice in one week I've had the worst asthma attacks I've ever experienced, including the ones I had at 19, 500 feet on Mount Kailash.
I'm afraid it's common knowledge that global warming is to blame. There seems to be about ten times the normal amount of pollen in the air. If Time and my almost bleeding eyes are to be believed. Wet winter, plants growing in soil, pollen bursting early from young flowers.
I wonder Tim, if your intense bodily reaction to that particular hyperobject might suggest to you just how 'deep' objects can affect each other? I mean how can we say that the object called Tim Morton and the hyperobject (assemblage) called ‘global warming’ don’t actually ‘touch’? Isn’t your ‘real essence’, in some sense, exposed and augmented by a direct but partial interaction (partial as in not all aspects of global warming are impacting you personally and completely) with that particular hyperobject?
ReplyDeleteOr, simply stated: what about allergies allows us to posit them as merely sensual and not an aspect of your integral or ‘real’ beingness in the world?
Michael, sensual causality is much more intimate than you assume...
ReplyDeleteDepends on who's "sensual causality" we're talking about here Tim.
ReplyDeleteIf we're talking about Tom Sparrow's idea of sensuality 'all the way down', then yes, I agree.
I happen to agree with Tom (if I read him correctly) that all interactions can be understood as sensual - only that I posit sensuality as ontologically continuous with all the other actual properties that objects (assemblages) intrinsically are.
For me the sensual is not as a cognitive or metaphysical fire-wall sheltering an object's 'real' essence, but an immanent and emanating feature of its actual constitution.
I grant you that I tend to read Harman in ways that he suggests are inaccurate to some extent, but I would defend myself by noting that it is the rhetorical strength on objectological discourse that concerns me most.
If “real objects” are completely withdrawn then the ‘real’ Tim Morton wouldn’t be so affected by the hyperobject of global warming, correct? Where is the vicar in being allergic?