Nathan of An Un-canny Ontology, responding to the same posts by Levi Bryant that I cited in my Tumblr workblog, asks the question: “What exactly happens during translation? What is translation? And why do some things get translated and others do not?” After mulling over this question for some time, Nathan concludes “that objects predict, expect, or anticipate other objects – they recognize potential.”

Now, I am not sure that this is the right answer — or, at the very least, I would argue that it isn’t all of the answer. Nathan makes this claim because, for instance, “for leafs [sic] to translate photons of light into complex sugars, they must recognize the photons of light as photons of light.” I suppose this is true in a sense: leaves will not — cannot — translate just anything into complex sugars. But I don’t see why “recognition” has to be the precondition. If anything, I’d say that the leaf’s “recognition” of the photon is a consequence of, rather than a precondition for, its “translation” of light into sugar. Re-cognition, and indeed any form of cognition, always comes afterwards; it is the error of cogntivists (which we human beings, unavoidably misunderstanding ourselves, tend to be much of the time) to think that cognition is a ground of action, when actually it is a result of action.

I think that the source of this problem, in Nathan’s account, is the following. He says that ” objects first and foremost recognize each other,” precisely because — here paraphrasing Levi, and also to an extent Graham Harman — “objects translate each other, they change each other without encountering each other directly.” But as I’ve said before, my biggest disagreement with both Levi and Graham is that, for me, objects do encounter each other directly. (Whitehead’s actual entities are a bit like Leibniz’s monads, but actual entities touch each other directly, as monads do not. Cf. also Gabriel Tarde, who posits monads that — unlike Leibniz’s — interact with one another directly).

Levi puts it this way:

One of Harman?s core claims is that objects withdraw from one another or never directly encounter one another. This is the Kantian moment in Harman?s ontology. Where Kant holds that we never have direct access to the thing-in-itself, emphasizing the relationship between mind and thing-in-itself, Harman generalizes this thesis to all relations between things, regardless of whether or not humans are involved. This is precisely why Harman?s ontology, despite being an ontological realism is also an epistemological anti-realism. In my own ontology, I refer to this general feature of things with the concept of ?translation?. As Gadamer (and Quine) taught us, every translation is a transformation.  (from this post)

I largely agree with this (as I’ve said before, here and here). I think that it is precisely right to generalize what Kant says about the mind’s encounter with external reality to all interactions between/among objects. However: unlike Levi, I am unwilling to equate Kant’s argument for the cognitive inaccessibility to the thing-in-itself with the thesis that “objects never directly encounter one another.” This is because contact or encounter cannot be reduced to cognitive access. In Kant’s account, we are affected by things-in-themselves, even though we can never know them. This is indeed the source of one of the most-remarked problems with Kant’s thought: he seems to be saying that, in some sense, things-in-themselves cause our perceptions of them, even though he explicitly says that causality is merely phenomenal (i.e. merely produced by the way our minds organize our sensations). There are two ways to resolve this dilemma. One is Hegel’s and Zizek’s way, which absolutizes Mind or Spirit or Subject, by saying that even the inaccessibility of things-in-themselves is in fact posited by the Mind in the first place. Obviously, I find this undesirable. The other alternative — or, more precisely, the move in the opposite direction — consists in distinguishing the way things affect other things from “causality” understood as a Transcendental Category (i.e. roughly, as a form of cognition). Causality, as a cognitive category, isn’t adequate to describe the way that the mind is non-cognitively affected by things-in-themselves. Or — to make the speculative realist generalization — causality, as a cognitive category, isn’t adequate to describe the way that an object affects, or is affected by, another object.This is one way of describing Whitehead’s distinction between “causal efficacy” (what I am calling non-cognitive affectivity) and “presentational immediacy” (which, for Whitehead, means the type of causal connection discussed by Hume and by Kant).

So I agree with Levi and Graham that an object never cognitively grasps any other object in its entirety. (This is what Levi calls epistemological anti-realism). But I disagree with their move of equating this cognitive inaccessibility with the claim that objects never directly encounter one another. My non-vicarious version of ontological realism consists in claiming that objects do directly encounter (or affect) one another — only they do so non-cognitively. This is precisely why our ontology can be realist, even when our epistemology is confessedly anti-realist. The translation that happens in every encounter between objects — i.e. when, in Whitehead’s terms, one object prehends another object — is a direct, but non-cognitive, encounter (in Whitehead’s terms, it is a process of feeling, in which an “actual entity” determines itself by making a “decision” about how it will feel that which moves it to feel. An object functions for another object, Whitehead says, as a “lure for feeling”).

[I know that Levi and Graham won't agree with my account here, and probably Nathan won't either. But none of this would have come clear to me -- to the extent that it has come clear -- if not for my puzzling over what they wrote].

I had a few people asking when I had grown a sexy fringe in the backmatter to PG2.5. I hadn’t, alas. The days of fringes are long behind me. It was my good friend, the splendid uberlady Jill Stafford, as pictured here. Due to me being momentarily shit, we didn’t caption her up. Man! What were we thinking(Answer: LET’S GET THIS TO THE PRINTERS ASAP). Pah! Anyway - our model was Jill Stafford, who was wearing the still-available-photo-T-shirt and does art like this…

And you should go see more.

Polish artist Szymon Klimek creates startlingly small models out of paper thin sheets of brass, which he displays in glass goblets. Even more astounding are his lilliputian, moving engines powered by the rays of the sun with the use of tiny solar panels. I have a raging nerd-on for work like this. I spent much of my youth attempting to hastily construct various types of models and miniatures. My lack of patience was a considerable hindrance, meaning that I left a long trail of shoddily painted plastic and wood behind me; amorphous piles of acrylic, enamel, and glue that in no way resembled the images that adorned their respective packages. One really must enjoy the process in order to construct magnificent pieces like Klimek’s and I, like many, am much more interested in the destination than the journey. I suppose that’s why they invented money.

via The Automata

Post tags: Art, Industrial, Sculpture

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One of the ongoing themes of this column has been gangs and the role they play in a Fourth Generation world. Here in the United States they already serve as an alternative primary loyalty (alternative to the state) for many urban young men. Gangs will likely be a major player in 4GW because gang members are expected to fight...   Read the full article. 

NOTE: Bill Lind has asked me to host his columns and his collaborative work on fourth generation warfare (4GW) theory. I've set up a blog dedicated to this called LIND. I will be fleshing it out over the next couple of days.   IF this model proves successful, and I get the OK from the copyright owners, I'll add a site for John Boyd, Martin Van Creveld, and others.

UPDATE:  I think the new LIND site has most of the basics including the seminal 1989 article, "The Changing Face of War:  Into the 4th Generation" and the new 4GW manuals.  Still need a compilation of #242-322 for the On War series, more pictures, and an approved biography.

UPDATE 2:   I've also created a new site for John Boyd related material.  Right now, it's more archive than a blog due to the lack of a stream of new content.  If anyone has content I've missed (and that's likely plenty), please send me a note and I'll include it.  Also, if there are any ideas on what can be used to generate new ongoing content, please let me know.

During last week’s PauseTalk (Vol. 35), Imre Ostmann introduced us to an art project he’s been working on called “Tokyo STOP.” The idea is to take a “long exposure photograph of seven people standing in a dead-end road during sunset.” He’s done four areas so far, and is looking for some volunteers for upcoming dates — you’ll find all the details here, including his contact info.