Though I’ve started these studies of timed logic with ways the present takes itself and other times as dimension, the time we have to turn to first, ‘originary time’ as Deleuze calls it, depends on another time for its ‘founding’, for setting it in motion. For time to flow, the…
Continue ReadingAuthor: James Williams
Semiology of Autopoiesis (II)
Selections of the Sign: Unity Maturana and Varela’s Autopoiesis: the Organization of the Living begins with a sentence indebted to George Spencer-Brown and his form of distinction where ‘distinction is perfect continence’. In their version, this becomes ‘A universe comes into being when a space is severed into two. A…
Continue ReadingThey can remove a monument, but they can’t erase the sign
2021 has been a year for removing and reassessing monuments around the world, from statues of slave traders to memorials for an uprising. One of the aims of state sponsored removals has been to eliminate a physical memento in order to obliterate the events it stood for. That aim can…
Continue ReadingSemiology of Autopoiesis (I)
What is the difference between conceptual analysis and semiology? An idea like autopoiesis can be analysed as a concept. We can study its description of self-making and autonomous organisations and life-forms for consistency, contradictions, meaning, references, through its cases and examples, its history, its implications and assumptions, and its values.…
Continue ReadingMatter and Sense in Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense: Against the ‘Ism’ in Speculative Realism
New article just published in Deleuze and Guattari Studies 15.4 (2021): 477–496DOI: 10.3366/dlgs.2021.0454 The article is part of Simon Schleusener’s edited volume Deleuze and the Material Turn. Simon’s collection is an important step in understanding Deleuze’s complex relation to new materialisms. It is a pleasure to have been able to…
Continue ReadingThe Danger of Group Signs: Philosophy and Covid-19
In the first year of the pandemic, there were many types of sign associated with Covid-19: warning signs; names; national symbols; new indicators for numbers and trends; orders; images; and instructions. However, when I wrote about Covid-19 and signs in 2020, I failed to predict the dominance of a particular…
Continue ReadingDeleuze’s Timed Logic (III) Tested to Destruction
When something is tested to destruction, for instance, when a seat is repeatedly pounded by a weight attached to a robot arm to gauge how long it will last in regular use, a series from the past traverses the present and extends into the future at each thump on the…
Continue ReadingStep Right Up
Step Right Up (Don’t be fooled by cheap imitations) The Egalitarian Sublime: a Process Philosophy is out in paperback this May. Edinburgh University Press will give you 30% off with the code PAPER30 if you buy direct from them
Continue ReadingFantastic pragmatism
[Discussion paper for Philosophy as a Method of Thinking Practices: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics and Post-Structuralism in the Light of Pragmatism, Università degli Studi di Milano, 10 Feb 2021] The argument of this paper is a tautology: To be fantastic, pragmatism must be fantastic But tautologies are vulnerable to the multiple and…
Continue ReadingFirst Principle of Pragmatics: Everything Evolves Amidst a Shared Problem
This is an edited text from the Pragmatism and the Analytic-Continental Split Conference, University of Sheffield, 09/08/17 – 11/08/17. I’d held it back, partly due to my reservations about the idea of a split, but I’m returning to it here, since its definition of pragmatics prepares for a later post…
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