“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, March 12, 2011

Interobjectivity and the Molten Core

Molten Core, Chernobyl

Global warming and radiation demonstrate how interconnected all entities are. Some sensuality, some “experience,” is shared between entities. I call this interobjectivity.

Sensual objects aren't just whimsical fantasies that do nothing. They are the very blood of causality. Just consider what's happening in Japan right now. Radiation is beaming from Uranium in at least two reactors that are melting down. Dust and soot particles emitting radiation are being blown by the wind for miles. The soot particles are samples of the reactor core, carrying their own horrifying information about the center of that beast. Telegrams from a literally molten core (Graham Harman's term).

The “information” carried by sensual objects isn't something you just read in a quiet armchair one Sunday afternoon when there's nothing else to do. It's alpha particles that quantum tunnel through your skin and into your internal organs, especially if you ingest a speck of soot.

If real means vivid, if real means having effects in the world on other entities, then for sure sensual objects are real.

This vividness is deeply shared by objects affected by it. This shared “experience” is what I call interobjective.

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