Sin, cos, & tan

Notes Towards an Object-Oriented Literary Criticism from Larval Subjects

As is familiar by now, object-oriented ontologists argue that objects are withdrawn both from one another andfrom themselves. Within my onticological framework, this points is expressed in the claim that objects are split-objects, divided by the domain of their virtual proper being and their local manifestations. Virtual proper being refers to the potentials or powers of an object which are never actualized as such, while local manifestation refers to the actualized properties of an object manifested under certain conditions.

In my current local manifestation, for example, my skin is rather pale. By contrast, during the summer, my skin becomes dark. In the latter instance, this is because I am spending a good deal of time outdoors and therefore my skin color changes as a result of sunlight. If I am able to change in these ways, then this must be because my body possesses a virtual dimension, a dimension of potencies or powers, that enables it to manifest itself in a variety of ways. These differing manifestations will be in part due to internal dynamics of an object, but also its exo-relations to other objects. I call the field of these exo-relations a “regime of attraction” because it plays a role in what qualities an object actualizes in the world. In the case of my tan, for example, the regime of attraction involves the sun among other things.

What is Unseen from Cafe Hayek by Don Boudreaux

Each American, as both consumer and producer, is connected to hundreds of millions of other persons across the nation and the globe in a web of commercial relationships so vast, intricate, and nuanced that it is impossible to trace out and quantify in detail how changes in one part of this web affect other parts of the web.

Moreover, changes within this global web of commercial relationships are incessant, with changes in consumers’ demands for imports being simply one among a gazillion changes that occur each year. […]

It bears repeating again and again: there is nothing economically special about international trade as compared to intranational trade – save, of course, for the sorry fact that politicians and rent-seeking producers find it easy to demagogue for their own greedy, narrow purposes.