she did OK

She was in the nest when I got back, and I advanced fairly far into the apartment before she heard me. Then she came running out of the nest. It was about 3 minutes of celebrating my return, followed by sudden near-screams meaning that she needed to be fed. She didn’t seem to understand that the feeding requires preparation, so I had a screaming kitten following me around as I prepared the meal for her.

The main effect of the 11-hour absence, of course, is that she is not remotely willing to be out of sight of me. So, my mobility is severely diminished with a kitten sitting on my shoulder or, more difficult yet, on one of my shoes.

And what a ravenous appetite today! It felt like she consumed as much as or more than her body mass, though I’m sure that’s literally impossible.

One other thing I noticed today is that kittens seem to have a somewhat reasonable sense of what heights are safe or unsafe to jump from. Tamanya occasionally makes jumps to the ground that are slightly unwise, but on the whole you can see her carefully thinking and judging before each leap, even if some of the estimates are a little bit off.

a bit of philosophy amidst the kitten posts

What I’ve been working on whenever Tamanya sits on my shoulder (like a parrot) and purrs (unlike a parrot) is Badiou’s Theory of the Subject. But what I’m thinking of at the moment is something Tim Morton said on his blog:

“The image is also a good example of what Meillassoux calls ‘the rich elsewhere’—his description for Graham Harman’s initial statement about objects.”

Tim’s probably right that Meillassoux was referring to me there, but the person he actually mentions is Latour. Meillassoux’s complaint is that the correlational circle is a very powerful argument, but that people like Latour (and me, by implication) simply respond by saying: “Yes, but the correlationist is so boring. There is a rich and diverse world, and I have no interest in wasting my time on this boring correlational argument.” He calls this a “secession” rather than an argument. Meillassoux’s claim, at the Speculative Realism Workshop at Goldsmiths, is essentially that no philosophy can be a rationalism unless it passes through correlationism all the way to the end and realizes that correlationism is (initially) a powerful argument that naive realism cannot withstand.

In my book on Meillassoux, forthcoming in July, one of my claims is that the correlational circle cannot get him where he’s trying to go. We can give the following stripped-down spectrum of possible views on the real world, insofar as this is relevant to Meillassoux’s argument:

1. naive/dogmatic realism. (“there is a real world, and we can know it”)
2. weak correlationism; Kant. (“there is a real world, but we can only think it, not know it”)
3. strong correlationism. (“the thought of a world outside thought is a contradiction in terms, but that world might exist anyway”)
4. idealism (“there is nothing outside thought”)

It is by exploring the tension between 3 and 4 that Meillassoux attempts to generate his own, novel position: speculative materialism.

One of my claims in the book is that position 3 is impossible, and thus the ensuing deductions about contingency do not work since they follow from an impossible premise. To take the correlational circle as Meillassoux recommends seriously entails that one become an idealist.

I’ve said this here before, but it’s been a few months.

Another puzzle in Meillassoux, that has not often been noted: despite his concept of hyperchaos, he thinks that laws of nature do exist. These laws can change at any moment for no reason whatsoever, but they are laws nonetheless. Local actions are governed by natural laws. Hence the distinction in his philosophy between virtuality and potentiality: the latter can indeed by measured according to statistical law, whereas the former cannot because there is no sum total of possible cases, not even an infinite number. This puzzled me for a long time, but then I noticed that it’s rather reminiscent of Badiou’s own distinction between the event and the state of the situation.

Finally, I’m more sympathetic to Meillassoux’s “virtual God” argument than many have been. Not because I find that particular notion compelling, but because it’s hard not to enjoy his shift from mapping the world in terms of its most likely possible future to its most significant possible future. You can do that if you’ve eliminated probability from the future of the world, after all. To be more specific, he says roughly: “Yes, there could also be a unicorn-to-come or spaghetti-monster-to-come, but who cares about these monsters? They would change nothing.” The only futures that matter are great possible leaps, and there’s only one remaining possibility, he says. But that’s the part I find contestable.

reading these days

Balzac. Just for the heck of it.

internal clock

Forgot to mention another anecdote. The kitten woke me up to be fed again last night. Suddenly the thought hit me: “I’ll bet it’s 1:30.” So I looked at the clock on the iPhone, and it was 1:29. That’s three straight nights where she woke me up at almost exactly 1:30. Uncanny.

Incidentally, maybe you can already tell from the photos, but her whiskers are white on the right side and brown on the left, just like her face.

from last night

That’s my left hand, for scale. She’s going to be tiny for awhile to come, but we’ll try to get her up to over a kilogram in the near future. With a few more breakfasts like today’s, it shouldn’t be hard. She acted like she was in an eating contest; I’ve rarely seen any living creature eat so fast.

big step forward for the kitten

Tried some solid food and milk on a plate before work, and she completely devoured both without assistance. That helps on a couple of fronts. I won’t need to worry now about leaving her for 11 or 12 hours as sometimes will happen on work days including the commute. And I also won’t be awakened so often for bottle-feeding, which will take life more back to normal. After that huge morning breakfast she also went straight into the nest and didn’t even notice me leaving.

Why was I worried she wouldn’t eat solid food yet? Because she would hardly touch any nourishment at all for the first 24 hours, and that ended only when I started with the bottle-feeding. In retrospect, that must have had less to do with her current developmental stage than with the general first-day situation of emotional trauma and physical weakness and flea/worm infestation.

In any case, the underlying playfulness and even wit are beginning to emerge. She is going to be a smart, funny, and beautiful cat.