This is a question for Kavita, following our discussions of distributed ontology.
I’m wounder if property is a candidate for rethinking via distributed ontology. If property is understood a a relation, rather than a thing with a status, might we then think of the question of ontology — becoming– as located in the relations (which are multiply moded, yes, but also uneven spatially dispersed and extensive, as well as sedimented via multiple genealogies and ways of mobilizing time) ? Does McPherson help here?
Yes, to both this opening as well as the Distributed Ontology II musings. I just re-read Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and it’s amazing how it reads as an answer to many of our questions about ontology, property, production. It would’ve been a great one to read together; perhaps sections for our graduate classes next Spring? I don’t know where to start quoting as I was tempted to transcribe half the book when I read your last post. So I am mulling on this point while you’re away, and hopefully will have something more substantial to say when you return.
on this question viz property/ontology and hauntology, a chapter of butler’s Psychic Life of Power, i believe it is chapter two that negotiates between psychic attachment and subjection/formation of power. hauntology is a figure rather than a concept and refers to something we can verify as part of our every day experience as well as a feature of intricate systems we observe in our various scholarly domains. foucault references something similar when he reaches for the concept of sublimation to describe how an older (eastern) epistemology is folded into, translated through, reappears within a modern scientific matrix of knowledge to which we are attached (in the sense that we could not reason without it). this happens in history of sexuality vol 1 and it is odd than few people pick up on it.
hauntology is a version of this psychoanalytic insight into complex temporalities. i’m intrigued to hear that scholars of technopolitics are talking about this.