Monday, October 26, 2015

Of folds and plitology

From this recent Bryant blog post. Here is an excerpt of interest to this thread:

"The minimal unit of being is the fold.  The minimal unit of being is not the things, not the object, but the dyad; the dyad between thing and field. [...] The fold is a thought of continuity.  That which is folded, the thing, is continuous with the field out of which it is folded.  Where object-oriented philosophy proclaimed an independence of all relation, a discrete conception of being composed of units, pli-tology speaks of an interiorization of a field in the formation of a fold that is both continuous with the field out of which it is folded, yet distinct from it.  Folding, of course, is an activity, a verb.
"The foldings of being should not be conceived as something that occur within being that is then finished in accomplished– a sort of dialectic between the potential and the actual, of dunamis and energeia –but rather as an ongoing activity or process of folding where there are perpetual exchanges between thing or the folded and field or that which is folded.  The folded arises from the field, creasing it in all sorts of complex ways, and rebounds back upon the field modifying it in all sorts of ways.  Here I hasten to add that dyadism is not a dualism.  There is not one thing, the object, and another thing, the field.  There is instead inseparable bond between the two, the folding of their difference, the activity of their differentiated, which both divides and unites.  Things are, as Stacy Alaimo argues, trans-corporeal; they are folded into one another, sheathed in one another, in a generalized dyadism."

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