what a strange little world the Temptress lives in, thinking that everybody wants to spend their time hopping around European capitals in order to chat with Meilassoux about kitchen appliances, then blawg about the pictures of her labrador in Ioway. But i suppose solitary confinement does that to eunuchs, and sooner or later, she will turn into an Object.

how exactly?

In contrast Latour thinks they’re both costly detours, best junked.

more detail please

PC, I like your “proposition that the shift to postmodernity didn’t actually entail the dissolution of grand narratives, as much as the sight of them in multi-dimensional mode, the knowledge that they were being produced.” This ’standing beside ourselves’ (or ‘double consciousness’, as W.E.B. DuBois termed it in a different context), the increasing inability to live naively in a stably granted second nature (your mention of parallels; and Mikhail’s been talking about ‘parallax’) seems to be the common thread in a whole range of intellectual and cultural products of the past hundred years or so.

It seems to be modernity or modernism as such that makes it so; it’s not like this is the first time in history that people have come into reality-disconfirming contact with each other, but the modes and discourses of modernity seem to make this a particularly disruptive or at least fretful experience. It seems to harden the boundaries, to use John’s metaphor. I think it’s in this sense that Toulmin offers the argument in Cosmopolis that modernity was an anomalous historical eruption, hegemonic but never totally dominant, to which postmodernism is a balance-restoring corrective. In contrast Latour thinks they’re both costly detours, best junked.

Kvond, I love the image of the box with its marketing metanarrative on the front and its ‘facts’ on the sides that we flip between.