“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


Thursday, February 24, 2011

Tardis Objects





Flying from Sacramento to Newark involves two planes and a transit in the never popular O'Hare airport.

It strikes you immediately that inside a plane or an airport there are countless objects--people, clothes, food, conversations, all milling about differently.

In a flattish ontology where we don't discriminate against medium-sized objects in the name of the tiny (undermining) or the vast (overmining) we have to accept a truth that Levi refers to as strange mereology: there are more parts than wholes.

Or to put it another way, the inside of an object is bigger than its outside.

This startling intuition is just one way in which OOO escapes correlationism, reductionism and holism in one fell swoop. If you like it means that a feature of the Kantian sublime--inner space is bigger than outer space--is extended to all entities.

1 comment:

daz hastings said...

Two days ago I had good fortune to go "in" Wookey Hole, underneath/inside the Mendips, yeah? Big underground river. Caverns of interior space. They've added mucho amusements since "our" day: dinosaurs, fake snow, old coin slots and a circus (tis true tis true!) as well as great reconstruction of the first mobile entertainment Wagon 1768 by Philip Astley first circus seen (apparently) in Waterloo Station). Enourmous objects everywhere, plump inside with a view of the Tor. Like this blog, it comes highly recommended as a place in which to think