on Ivakhiv’s posts

I’m actually just about to crash for the night, and did find time to read and enjoy both.

The more critical remarks are in the second post, on Prince of Networks. September is a terrible month for me in terms of available free time, so I’m not sure if those posts will receive the response they deserve.

One thing I’m pretty sure about, however, is that it’s harder for me to follow longer arguments on computer screens than on paper. There are probably various factors involved, including such mundane points as not being able to mark up Ivakhiv’s post on my screen with a pen very easily. Sure, I could cut and paste his posts into Word and then print it, but that involves several steps given the unfortunate technological setup I have here at home for printing (not worth explaining, since you’d have to hear all about Egypt’s wireless infrastructure and some quirks connected therewith).

As you all probably now, I’m fully in favor of revolutionizing the means of distributing ideas, but there are still a few points of detail that need to be solved.

In any case, I enjoyed Ivakhiv’s post. The one thing I never understand, however, is why people think I’m claiming that objects don’t need relations in order to exist. There’s an equivocation that people always make that wrongly identifies the relations of a thing’s pieces with the outer relations in which it itself becomes involved. In other words, of course Cairo only exists because a number of smaller entities exist that give rise to a larger Cairo-object (though it is by no means the sum of them all, since many changes in the pieces do not register in the Cairo-object at all). But that is not the same thing as saying that Cairo is nothing more than the system of its relations with other objects. This latter position is called relationism, and it’s bad.

Ivakhiv’s point about the river needing the valley to be what it is cuts no ice with me, beautiful though the image may be. The true statement here would be that the “river valley” couldn’t be what it is without the river and the valley. The valley can bring out new flavors in a river just as a friendship, marriage, or job can bring out new flavors in individual people. But that doesn’t mean that people and things only are what they are by virtue of the specific relations in which they are now involved. I’m never even sure why this idea sounds liberating to anyone. Only because something in me is not fully expressed by anything that happens can anything new ever happen to me.

In any case, I enjoyed the posts very much.