literature, art, physics

Roughly speaking, those are the topics of the three books on my desk tonight.

*literature. Meillassoux on Mallarmé. It looks as though he’ll be trying to draw new lessons for the metaphysics of contingency from Mallarmé’s most radical poem. There was a bit about Mallarmé in L’Inexistence divine (though it didn’t make the cut when I was trying to decide what to include), but at first glance the new book seems to go much further.

*art. I was asked to contribute to ArtForum‘s annual year-end book issue, giving a brief review of an important new book from 2011. Eliminating all books written by personal friends, as well as those I’m already committed to reviewing elsewhere, the one I chose was the “new”Media and Formal Cause by Marshall & Eric McLuhan. The reason for the scare quotes is that all four of the essays in the volume were already published at various times from 1966 onward. However, they have never been collected together, and once this is done, new light is shed on the role of formal causation in McLuhan, especially the later work. Now less than ever does “technological determinist” seem like an apt description of McLuhan. The whole point of his version of formal cause is to make causal determinacy of any kind impossible. The fact that the background medium dominates all conscious figural life (just as in Heidegger, incidentally) does not (unlike in the late Heidegger) tend towards a passive awaiting. McLuhan puts the burden on artists to create anti-environments for whatever the current environment is, and this can always take numerous different forms. History for McLuhan is dominated by retrievals and reversals, and these (or at least retrieval, certainly) requires good hard work by some human agent. My reservations about McLuhan’s approach concern his assumption that this also entails that “processes” are more important than individuals. In my view, this is a simple non sequitur.

*physics. In the works for a date within the next year is a public discussion between me and a prominent quantum theorist about space and time. More information will be forthcoming once the event is finalized, which should be soon.