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Anne Dalke's picture

surprises

Thanks to you all for participating in the thought experiment Liz and I posed to you in this last session; I was especially heartened by all the back-and-forthing it provoked, both among our various projects and our various selves.

I wanted to record here some of the surprising things that emerged for me out of this exchange; these included the challenges

  • to our initial characterization of our fall conversations as being "human-centric," on the grounds that they highlighted both what is random (that is, what is not controlled by intentionality), and what is "now" (i.e., with "no perspective");
  • to our instructions to you to name what is "most interesting," as running curiously and strikingly counter to the "punch line" of OOO: to re-figure the world as without hills and valleys, without foregrounds and backgrounds;
  • to our characterization of the instruction to describe what other people said as a "dislocation," on the grounds that speaking for another person is less "dislocating" than an "enlargement of our location";
  • to take this project in a radical direction, in which nothing is privileged:
    is then ontology even possible?
    is what we understand even communicable?
    why do we (for example) privilege objects,
    over "what does not cohere"?
    over "what is not local"?
    why do we have such a "fetish for things we can name"?
    why distinguish between objects and their environments?
  • to a long history of such practices in (for example) Japanese Buddhism; consider (for example) the "enlightenment of insentients": might it be more useful to ask--not whether things have a perspective, but--whether they "have Buddha nature"?
  • to acknowledging that no physical system exists without highs and lows
    (due to historical "expansion and contraction"):
    do such natural systems prevent or invite us to imagine mental systems with different morphologies?
    how useful is it to engage in the mental discipline of imagining "what is not possible"?

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