Michael at Archive Fire has been doing an excellent job summarizing and, at times, mediating between Levi, Bogost, and myself (and others). See, e.g., here, here, and here. He’s genuinely trying to see the best of both perspectives and to weave them into some concordance. Paragraphs like the following, which reframes the discussion over life and the mouse in space, are particularly useful:
In this case, ‘life’ is not just a “quality”, or “singularity”, it is an emergent property embodied in the mouse’s extensive and intensive constitution – a constitution, or composition, or assemblage that is intrinsically processual, temporal and always existing in relation. Whatever ‘withdrawness’ an entity has it has by virtue of its structural depth – its embodied ‘local’ (which is actually co-local) complexity.
Very well put.
