There's something like a conversation about Graham's use of the term fashionable to describe philosophies of the pre-individual.
A rough Google search yields a substantially larger number of hits for philosophies of the pre-individual than for philosophies of substance. Many of those hits are from pretty recent blogs, while hits for the latter tend to be from more stodgy stuff.
English lit., which prides itself on being fashionable, is saturated (and has been since about 2002) with Simondon, Massumi et al. I remember visiting Rutgers around then, Princeton, NYU and UPenn, and hearing that “we don't do Derrida” anymore...instead “we do” autopoesis...That was about when the shift really got going I reckon.
Maybe the problem is with the term fashionable itself. I think whenever you talk to the subject position (the attitude with which one holds an idea), you tend to get a reaction, which is why Hegel used that tactic. One thing Graham does is write very stimulating prose.
In wider horizons of culture and ideology, “flow” and “process” are way more fashionable than “objects” and “substances.” People call it “the flow” not “the substance” when they want to reference some kind of “zone” or “Zen” type of an experience or activity.
Now back in the day (say 1100AD) they called it “the single sphere” in Tibet. Now we're talking!
1 comment:
I see your argument but fashionable and popular or fashionable and dominant don't have the same rhetorical bite. In academia fashionable is not a nice thing to say to someone, trend is a little better, development or something like that would be neutral.
My problem with how that term is deployed is that then any philosophy talking about becoming or flow or process is already done it cant be something new. But in that same post Graham says keeping the vocabulary is important but if I want to do something similar to Deleuze or Bergson et all I'm fashionable because what I'm riffing off of is more recent? That doesn't seem right to me.
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