Thursday, April 25, 2013

Plurimodes, prepositions, differance

Continuing the theme of recent posts, I was re-reading a section of the  OOO thread I came upon this post, relevant excerpt below:

And while I'm on Latour's independent modes, he said something on p. 331* [of The Speculative Turn] that reminded me of our earlier discussion about the different systems in a human being suobstances in themselves requiring translation between each other.**

* Where Souriau talks of a human being composed of the independent modes of body, mind and spirit.


** P. 72: "In Luhmann's theory the 'human being' is not conceptualised as forming a systemic unity. Instead it has to be understood as a conglomerate of organic and psychic systems. The former consists of biochemical elements, the latter of thoughts. Both systems are operatively closed against each other: no system can contribute elements to the respectively other system. The systems are however structurally coupled; i.e. their respective structures are adjusted to each other in such a way as to allow mutual irritations" (9-10).

This also reminded me of a connection I made between prepositions as linguistic extensions of image schema, and thus a candidate for a metalinguistic organizing principle. Latour said:

"At the beginning of this presentation, I cited the sentences where Souriau was linking his project with that of James on prepositions as things we experience directly even though the first kind of empiricism has always denied it. ‘Here we would be in a world where the or rather, or the because of, the for, and above all the and then, and thus, would be true existences'" (331).

Latour or Souriau don't relate prepositions to image schema; I did that. But we can see the implication of prepositions via image schema "as things we experience directly."

Also in that section Latour goes into how philosophers get attached to a particular mode when in fact there are multiple modes. Latour noted that there must be a way to "enchain" the modes, i.e., integrate them. He suggests "variation itself.... difference differs even more differently" (331). I referenced this earlier in the thread as differance, and how later in the thread this is the withdrawn endo-relational structure of our known pluriverse.

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