Slog

News & Arts

Line Out

Music & the City
at Night

« Newsflash: Celebrity Pastor Needs N… | The Sincerity of Seattle Mayors »

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Life The One As Compossiblities

Posted by Charles Mudede on Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 12:00 PM

My last philosophical problem for 2009: We know that Virno's concept of the general intellect resolves "the one" as conceptualized by Hegel. It resolves it by reversing it. Meaning, in Hegel all is becoming one, becoming unified, becoming the absolute, which for Hegel is the only truth—a part of the all is, according to this system, incomplete, false, inadequate (in the Spinozistic sense—Spinoza being Hegel without history, or Hegel being the solution of Spinoza and Vico). With Virno, the all, or the one, precedes the individual. And so the one is something like Simondon's pre-individual elements—or, the one can be seen as the common, what is common to all: language, genetic materials, biosemotics, air, matter, culture. What I would like to do is to think of this pre-individual stuff, the base of the individuating process, in the terms of Leibniz's fantastic theory of compossibility. The one is composed of competing compossibles (I picture it as a kind of quantum foam), and what becomes an individual is nothing else than an alliance of a set of compossibles, and this set is made up of pre-individual elements. That is my last philosophical thought of the year.

Comments (10) RSS

Oldest First Unregistered On Registered On Add a comment

Me fail teleological monism? - That's uncompossible!

I thought you were all about the dialectic...

You (and I) areall over the map here Charles. More important, you omit the oomph Determinism requires to your own analytical detriment. Seems you may be trying to imply it, but your route is hackneyed.

Posted by oxyala trio

on December 31, 2009 at 12:38 PM

Yes, foam.

Posted by Rich Jensen

on December 31, 2009 at 12:49 PM

Well, Charles, you can't dance if your lips are numb.

Posted by Groucho Marxist on December 31, 2009 at 1:26 PM

Well, Charles, you can't dance if your lips are numb.

Posted by Groucho Marxist on December 31, 2009 at 1:27 PM

I'm sorry. That wasn't even worth saying the first time.

Posted by Groucho Marxist on December 31, 2009 at 1:28 PM

I read "an individual is nothing else than an alliance of a set of compostables". I like it much better that way. Compossibles is not a word.

Posted by Fnarf

on December 31, 2009 at 1:43 PM

I try to put my dead bodies in the Sound, not the yard waste.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on December 31, 2009 at 2:19 PM

Charles, this is great. I would only add that Deleuze describes modernism as involving "bifurcations, divergences, incompossibilities, and discord [that] belong to the same motley world." This is the Whitehead chapter of Deleuze's Leibniz book 9p. 81), and Deleuze explicitly cites Whitehead, Joyce, Borges, & Gombrowicz. This would mean an individuality that is still a matter of selection among the "quantum foam" of "competing compossibles," but instead of being " an alliance of a set of compossibles," it is instead a holding-together of a particular set of incompossibles, an activity of jumping from one to the next.

Steve Shaviro

Posted by shaviro on December 31, 2009 at 2:30 PM

Yeah...! I agree with what Steve said... jumping blissfully from one mushroom to the next... C Taylor.

Posted by C Taylor. on December 31, 2009 at 3:02 PM

Thank you for reminding me that I will never be as smart as I had hoped I would be. Man, this year is already fucking shitty.

And yes, both those expletives were absolutely necessary.

Posted by Dee on January 4, 2010 at 11:17 AM