(sermons get a bad rap. They're great. I think, if anything, we need more sermons. Maybe disguised ones, but) I think Adam Curtis, as heavy-handed as he can be, is at least on the right track. But then also: plenty of adam curtis movies, no one seems to ultimately translate that into doing anything - despair, despair.

This is obviously a bit far afield, but I wish the left was able to do this in terms of storytelling i.e (mythologizing, sermonizing, poeticizing etc etc) I think the theory stuff is great, but I also sometimes picture like, 50 columbia grads at zucotti park talking to one another about hyper-nuanced stuff, and like 10 of these splitting off to try to talk to the group (Ranciere said !). I think the Left is reallllly lacking invigorating narrative power these days. And everything you've said about theory, imo, applies to (mythologizing, sermonizing, poeticizing) as well. — csalisbury

Depressing but true. Ironically I think it's actually really hard - perhaps much harder than being 'hyper-nuanced' - to weave a good, punchy tale with an eye to political action. There are elements of the left that try to do this - Sanders and Corbyn being the two obvious ones, but I also really like the kind of writing that George Monbiot does, as well as Byung Chul-Han, who has been releasing what are essentially pamplets of critique (all his books are about 100 or so pages) which are easily digestible and appropriately sermony. Also Varoufakis, but he's got that Greek arrogance which makes him hard to relate to. But there really is no MLK of our time... (and MLK knew his Aristotle and Hegel!).

There's also something to be said about the fact that it's harder and harder to tell stories in general (and the the right always seems to appeal to stories about stories to get around this particular hurdle), which has to do with the fragmentation of our psychic lives under capitalism, but yes, a bit far afield.

Those who think that thought merely 'reflects' the real in a 'transcendental' sense (w/r/t Laruelle use of the term 'transcendental' - a use, btw, which bothers me to no end), miss precisely this power of thought, it's introduction of novelty into the world in which it thinks about.

Eh. I imagine using philosophy to find things out about stuff is precisely what Laruelle intends by a transcendental stance towards philosophy. Treat it as a synthetic a-priori generating machine, but one among others - not the. Perhaps this is a misreading, but it reminds me very much of Deleuze's remarks about concepts as bricks.

'A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.'

And I think this where is the pairs thing gets me. Because [pairs] is clearly up a level. It's base-level is already a relational, cognitive one.

I don't think it's clear that all universals operate like this, such that, ultimately, a particular relates to itself through relation to another thing.

So, the doggie route may have been a bad one. I think the Paul one is better. I recognize Paul. This definitely involves an as-structure: I see Paul as Paul. But I don't see Paul as Paul @tx related to Paul @ty related to [timeless] Paul. I just see Paul. — csalisbury

But if you acknowledge the as-structure, then a token-type relation 'falls out' of it: an as-structure is a sumsumptive structure where something belongs to a class of (a higher order) something else. I think the best way to bring this out is to turn again to - let's call it - the argument from misrecognition. Say you recognise Paul, and you call out 'Hi Paul!'. But, it turns out, it's not Paul. Just a bloke a who looks alot like him from a distance. A question: how is this misrecognition possible? How did you misrecognize George as Paul? Surely this misrecognition is only possible on the basis of an implicit two-level 'game': object-level (the thing so recognized: George, Paul), and meta-level (the 'concept' Paul). Otherwise you wouldn't have misrecognized George - you simply wouldn't have recognized him tout court.

This is probably a better way to put it than say that it's a case of recognizing 'hypotethical Pauls' (as I wrongly said about the apples). On the other hand, there is perhaps there's something to be said of the fact that this (two levels) only becomes explicit in the case of 'breakdown' or misrecognition, a lot like - perhaps exactly like - when Heidegger discusses his broken hammer and the ready-to-hand/present-to-hand distinction, where recognising Paul is, for the most part, a case of ready-to-handedness, whereas thinking about it in terms of tokens and types is a present-to-hand retrojection/abstraction that isn't 'there' in the ready-to-handedness of simply meeting a real life Paul.

But - this would be cold comfort to the realist insofar as with the ready-to-handedness approach, there is no questino of thinking in terms of tokens and types, and thus no question of universals and particulars.

Also, I never thought about making the connection to Marx's commodity or Lacan's master signifier, but yeah, that would be something very productive to explore.

All good points but I think this shift to a heideggerean approach actually highlights the point I was trying to make. I think you’re saying something similar, actually, to what I was saying with Hegel. in any case - in these examples, some kind of implicit and universal-ish preawareness has to be at work in order for misrecognition to work, for the ready-to-hand to become present-at-hand. This is the realist’s in : yes token-type ‘talk’ - explicit reflection on token-types -is already outside a ready-to-hand approach. But, as you say, it ‘falls out’ of more primitive as-perception. The monkey might quite easily recognize boots as boots without needing a physical boot-token. However, he might need a token to start leveraging that implicit knowledge for higher level tasks (like seeing pairs)

In short: the realist’s retort would be: maybe (literal) tokens are needed to talk about this stuff, but they point toward (real) universals already at work.