Some musings on Sophia Speaks

See this prior post for the links. Some of my musings from that thread follow.

From Balder's paper in reference to my selected excerpts:

"Bruno Latour (2011) considers the primary domain of concern opened by prepositional reflection to be the modes of existence that beings might occupy in relation to one another. But since prepositional phrases also function adjectivally, a prepositional orientation cannot be considered to be exclusively dedicated to a process orientation. Instead, it moves in zones of concern that touch on substances and processes equally, without absolutizing either narrative" (59).

The previous excerpts also highlight this notion of prepositions as what pre-positions the modes of existence. I.e., I'm seeing that while they are also parts of speech they also act as that which ties the other parts of speech into an embodied and coherent grammar. They are linguistic (metaphoric) extensions of the major pre-lingusitic image schema.


On 65 Balder notes Serres as interested in, among other things, "adjacency." Which reminds me of Layman's "Principles of adjacency." In that thread I made the principles concrete in embodied tai chi practice, showing how our boundaries are that pre-positional differance.

Recall this from the Latour thread:

A clue may be found in the Gifford lectures. At 44 he notes that we need a concept regarding the modes, "what in which they expand."  It is the non-formatted space, what James called the multiverse. That is, the multiverse is anterior to when actants are contextualized within a mode. And this speculation is of import: "The multiverse itself might be discontinuous" (52.) Which of course takes us back to the initial thread post, where "variation itself that has to be considered equivalent to true beings. Alterity alters yet another degree. Difference differs even more differently." And how this non-formated multiverse nonetheless, again using James (and Souriau), can be understood with prepositions which are "neither an ontological domain, nor a region, territory, sphere, or material." They are that which "prepares the position...to what follows." Remember how I compared image schema here, which are embodied and pre-linguistic, and upon which various linguistic and philosophic modes build. And my suggestion to Balder that indeed prepositions as extensions of image schema might indeed be not just another mode (or part of speech) but what 'integrates' them in a sense.

I went into some of Sallis in this post. An excerpt:

"What is needed is a logic that addresses the originary openings in which things first come to show themselves, a logic of schemata, spacing, and imagining.[...] Sallis identifies several schemata (spatio-temporal determinations) such as simultaneity and spatial proximity that correspond to various logical categories. In each case the key feature is the yoking together of contradictory terms in a unity that neither destroys the terms nor cancels either of them."

In this post is Sallis ruminations on khora, akin to my own. For example, in this passage he is discussing khora's relationship to 'elementals,' aka image schema:

"Khora hovers on the very edge of nothingness, never showing itself as itself, but only in conjunction with the presence of the elemental bodies, as a trace of 'something,' which can never itself be made present. It is thus 'something' very much like what Derrida named différance: an originary spacing and 'differencing' that presence presupposes and that, as a condition for the possibility (and paradoxically the impossibility) of presence, can never itself be present."

From the first link in the last post:

"Elementals are neither things nor properties thus 'the law [traditional logic] that would govern the belonging of properties to things has no bearing' (151). Instead elementals provide jointures and horizons of things, disclosing their fundamental event-like nature. Thus the elementals and imagination share a special bond, as the imagination gathers and holds together the spatio-temporal dynamics of the elementals."

And of relevance from this post, which of course reminded me of the Sallis material in the very next post:
So here's what Museque said to me:

"You're still seeing ISs as a fixed entity within a hierarchical relation. Whereas what you're calling ISs is a much more particular and general process between each and every level of any holarchy. It is that space between the boundaries of any two suobjects, that place where they exchange material and information. It is general in the sense that it is at every boundary, and it is particular in that it is specific to any given relational exchange. We might even call it, per Edwards, that mediating sign (Word) the allows communication between each. In humans it expresses as ISs; between other suobjects we'd call it something else."

A semi-accurate image for this is those fractal thing-a-ma-bobs that are so popular. Except that they are too pretty and symmetrical. Museque tells me that like onticological mereology each interation of a fractal boundary between suobjects is not the same, so the picture would be much more rhizomatic, diverse, each sign unique yet still a sign. A unique particular while also being a like general. A same/difference, as it were.

Still, how this expresses as an endo-structural organization is not clear, since the latter is supposed to be on the inside of a suobject, not in its exo-relation. But as I argued in the OOO thread, this inside/outside, endo-exo distinction is too crisp in Bryant, that perhaps ISs themselves are not just on the inside but are in fact in this boundary between. Where differance* is that transcendental pre-condition betwixt in and out, up and down, inside out and back again. Which of course changes everything. How though this can be 'structured'** is still beyond me. More consultation required.

* Aka my gal Khora, another name for Museque, the former being the more general, the latter specific to me.

** And perhaps it is not at all structured, being the unstructured space for Spenser-Brown which can only be inferred via the most tenuous of traces.