Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Push and pull of attraction and repulsion

[Re: The Resonant Soul: Gaston Bachelard and the Magical Surface of Air by Robert Sardello Debashish Mon 06 Jul 2009 04:27 PM PDT It's interesting that for Bachelard the element "air" (kin to Shakespeare's Ariel in The Tempest) is the psychic (soul) medium of lightness and free motion. Its more creatice aspect in the cosmos for him relates to "wind," which he equates with "anger" as that which moves towards passionate effectuation. (Shakespeare's play The Tempest again reflects this in its title and the active power leading to its story-line). This element in Sri Aurobindo is also inflected as "wind" (vayu) and seen as that stage in the manifestation when polarity emerges, leading to motion through the push and pull of attraction and repulsion. DB]

[In Latour an actor can be anything from a human being to a rock to a sign to a particular scientific instrument to the sun, etc. An actor is just any entity that acts or enters into a particular configuration or assemblage. From this perspective, a “society” is not a composition of human beings, but is an assemblage that includes humans and non-humans alike.
What an actor-network-theorist wants in an account of a social network is an analysis of the linkages among all these actors and how they manage to “black box” themselves or form a relatively stable assemblage. What is remarkable is not that things change, but that sometimes they manage to hold together. A lot of work has to be done to hold things together, because actors simply aren’t that cooperative, but are always introducing their own differences.
Speculative Realism Roundup
from Larval Subjects by larvalsubjects]

To "manage to hold together" is therefore the volitional normative. [TNM]

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