Implications of Textuality

Timothy Morton

 What Materialism Isn’t

“Wheel without wheel”

Field Ion Micograph of tungsten atoms

William Blake

David Bohm, Basil Hiley, Antony Valentini, Anton Zeilinger

 What Materialism Isn’t

Relativity
Newton
theory

mechanism
world tubes

point particles

metalanguage

Quantum theory

predictable

turbulent vortices

Field Ion Micograph of tungsten atoms

David Bohm, Basil Hiley, Antony Valentini, Anton Zeilinger

 What Materialism Isn’t

✗
✗

Nonorganic essentialism
Essentialist organicism

Relativity
theory

Newton
world tubes

mechanism

Quantum theory

turbulence

Nonorganic nonessentialism
Nonessentialist organicism

?
✓

Jacques Derrida, Alfred North Whitehead, Michel Serres

David Bohm, Basil Hiley, Antony Valentini, Anton Zeilinger

 Implication vs. Enactment

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind
(MIT, 1992)

F.R. Leavis, The Living Principle (Chatto and Windus, 1975)

David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge, 2008)

textuality

unicity

Parmenides

Zeno

Derrida

 Implication

Structure (syntax, lineation, stanza form, marks vs. nonmarks)

Texture (rhythm, rhyme)

Perception (imagery, tropes (“spin”)

Irony (“gapsploitation” (!))

hot
cool

David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge, 2008)

relative autonomy

carrier wave

holism vs.

holographic

ontology

 Implication

It was a hard thing to undo this knot.

The rainbow shines but only in the thought

Of him that looks.Yet not in that alone,

For who makes rainbows by invention?

And many standing round a waterfall

See one bow each, yet not the same to all,

But each a hand's breadth further than the
next.

The sun on falling waters writes the text

Which yet is in the eye or in the thought.

It was a hard thing to undo this knot.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “It was a Hard Thing,”

Selected Poetry, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford UP, 1998).

 Enactment and Enaction

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Francisco Varela, Evan
Dull would he be of soul who could not pass by
Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch,
A sight so touching in its majesty;
The Embodied Mind (MIT, 1992)

This City now doth, like a garment, wear
the fact is made present
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
as a realized state in the
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
reader's consciousness by
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
an expressive use of the
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
carry-over (the “lying
Never did sun more beautifully steep
open” is enacted)

In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;
F.R. Leavis, The Living Principle
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
(Chatto and Windus, 1975), 118

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

William Wordsworth, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge”

The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford UP, 2008).

 Implication

It was a hard thing to undo this knot.

The rainbow shines but only in the thought

Of him that looks.Yet not in that alone,

For who makes rainbows by invention?

And many standing round a waterfall

See one bow each, yet not the same to all,

But each a hand's breadth further than the next.

The sun on falling waters writes the text

Which yet is in the eye or in the thought.

It was a hard thing to undo this knot.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “It was a Hard Thing,”

Selected Poetry, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford UP, 1998).

 What Materialism Isn’t

Relativity
Newton
theory

mechanism
world tubes

point particles

metalanguage

Quantum theory

predictable

turbulent vortices

Field Ion Micograph of tungsten atoms

David Bohm, Basil Hiley, Antony Valentini, Anton Zeilinger

 Entanglement & Nonlocality

Albert Einstein, Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky,“Can Quantum-Mechanical
Description of Reality be Complete?” Phys. Rev. 47 (1935), 777–780.

Yuri Aharanov and David Bohm, “Significance of Electromagnetic Potentials in the
Quantum Theory,” Phys. Rev. 115.3 (August 1, 1959), 485–491.

John Bell, “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox,” Physics 1 (1964), 195–200.

Alain Aspect, Philippe Grangier and Gérard Roger, “Experimental Realization of
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm Gedankenexperiment: A New Violation of Bell’s
Inequalities,” Physical Review Letters 49.2 (2 July 1982), 91–94.

“We have demonstrated a tunable Cooper pair splitter device that opens the way to
studies of the entanglement of spatially separated mobile electrons. Because of its
remarkable splitting efficiency, such a device could provide a first test of the EPR
paradox in the solid state if it were implemented with ferromagnetic drain contacts
and noise measurements were performed on it.” (963)

L. Hofstetter et al., “Cooper Pair Splitter Realized in a Two-Quantum-Dot

Y-Junction,” Nature 461 (October 15, 2009), 960–963

David Bohm, Basil Hiley, Antony Valentini, Anton Zeilinger