“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


Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The Ever-Popular Network Thing

HT Cliff Gerrish. I haven't seen it yet, and somewhat arrogantly I think I know how it's going to go...“We don't need ontology anymore, in fact, ontology might be A Bad Thing. What we need is to understand stuff—so here is some stuff I learned by participating in the last two hundred years of avant garde/experimental/leading edge art, which in the West is predominantly constructivist. Here is some science that underwrites it.”

We shall see if I'm correct.

1 comment:

cgerrish said...

In the leap from hierarchical tree structures to flat rhizomatic structures, there's a feeling of radical accomplishment. The question of Being (Sein) is forgotten because it's not a question about the arrangement of das seinde (the ontically given). But in the end, the network is put forward as the universal formal structure of the brain and the universe. In that sense, it serves as a picture of correlationism.