Larval Subjects and several other blogs have begun their reading group of Manuel Delanda’s small but ambitious book A New Philosophy of Society. It’s not my favorite of his books — that remains the brilliant A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, followed by the drier, but useful, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. But I think New Philosophy is worth a re-read. (I had offered to participate in the group-think-thing but somehow my comment didn’t make it up on Levi’s blog, which is all to the good, as this week and next are hellishly busy for me. Levi is right, though, in suggesting that I’m developing an assemblage theory of my own. As are a lot of the post-ANT Deleuzians like Protevi, Berressem, et al. With the emphasis on the verb, as in the French “a-ssa(m)-blazh.”)
I also enjoyed the (rather inconclusive) recent discussions of Peirce on Larval Subjects. My hunch, as I suggested there, is that Peirce’s “firstness” has some commonality with OOO’s “withdrawing objects”: firsts withdraw from relation (so to speak), seconds are relations, and thirds are the destiny of relations (again, so to speak). But ultimately I think Peirce is far too processual-relational thinker to be incorporated into OOO without a serious struggle. I admire Levi’s attempt to grapple with him, in any case. The Peirce wave is only beginning, as more of his stuff gets published and worked over. We haven’t seen nothing yet. (OK, anything. Anything yet.)
