What I'm Saying These Days

Horror is the telepathy of flesh, taking telepathy to mean strictly passion at a distance, the susceptibility of a thing to another thing. Easy Think Substances are lumps of extension separated in time and space. No wonder it is difficult to imagine causality in a careful way given this separation, despite the scientistic cleanliness of the underlying things and their mechanisms as the little metal balls in an executive toy, clunking back and forth. The attempt to stave off action at a distance results in unsustainable paradoxes (paging Zeno). No respectable scientist thinks this way, but it is still somehow unacceptable for a humanist to state in the baldest way possible the formula for action at a distance, which just is the one sentence to which you can compress my study of causality, Realist Magic: objects are telepathic.

--from my talk this coming Friday at Jeffrey Cohen's place