a Dundee addition

Mike Burns also wrote to say that Peter Hallward will be joining me and Adrian Johnston for the Dundee event in late March.

Among other things, that means I’ll get to mention the “vacuum-sealed proletariat” again. I noticed Ben Noys poking fun at that phrase from the Zagreb tape (misquoting it as “vacuum-packed,” but no matter), but Ben simply missed the point: it came not from a political discussion with Peter, but an ontological one.

Peter believes in a relational ontology, and thinks that the class structure is one example proving that ontology must be a matter of relations. And I just said in response: I don’t see why. The point of my position is not to say that relations are excluded from reality– who could believe such a thing? My point is that relations generate a new reality that is not itself relational.

In other words, even if the proletariat arises from individual members in some sort of relation with one another and with various economic realities, this social class or any other (assuming it is real and not just a creature of the intellect, but that’s a different question) must also be considered as a reality autonomous from its own relations with other entities. We weren’t talking politics, we were talking ontology. And if the proletariat, chairs, or atoms are real, then they must exist in vacuo. Not that they don’t relate to anything else (an absurdity that I have never proclaimed) but that they are not constituted by their outward relations, however constituted they may be by their own internal components.

I’ve found that people have a hard time distinguishing the fact that I cannot exist without certain prior relations among my bodily organs from the fact that, once I exist, I do exist in independence from everything else. Lack of oxygen can kill me, but what it then kills is me, not my relation with oxygen.

Relations are considered to be so permanently avant garde simply because everyone has an image in their mind of dopey old reactionary theories of substance and essence. But not all such theories are dopey and reactionary.

But I think this is one of those issues that can’t be settled by “arguments” alone. The background has to change, and that will require that a lot more people become as sick of the dogmas of context and relationality as I already am. I don’t expect to be in the minority forever on these questions. But Peter will be in Dundee to make good counter-arguments, I’m sure.