a good passage from DeLanda

I’m teaching Chapter 2 of DeLanda’s A New Philosophy of Society tonight, and came across a very good passage on page 38 that for some reason I hadn’t marked as heavily as I usually do with passages this good (and since I wrote an article on the book, my copy is pretty heavily annotated):

“The fact that in order to exercise their causal capacities, internally as well as externally, [large assemblages such as cities] must use people as a medium of interaction does not compromise their ontological autonomy any more than the fact that people must use some of their bodily parts (their hands or their feet, for example) to interact with the material world compromises their relative autonomy from their anatomical components.”

There is a certain compulsion on the part of many people to think that unless something is tiny or basic, it can’t be real– as if strawberries revealed their truth only when tossed into a blender, and the resulting juice then vaporized in a furnace, and the smoke of the berries then put through a centrifuge, and then even the resulting particles called “derivative” of some sort of non-physical mathematical quasi-structure. The fact that medium-sized entities aren’t everything does not mean that they are nothing. In my opinion it is really a rather stupid dogma to think that humans encounter nothing but nullities that need to be crushed (whether into powder or into numbers) in order to yield some trace of reality.