Christian Clark's on goings going on

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One interim conclusion that might be drawn from part 3 is that objects are not known through a description of their properties, but objects are known through the difference that they make. Moreover, if the difference objects make are as participant-comparisons, then this is the material and dynamic work of finding what goes with what, the testing of connections and separations. Hence, knowledge is not longer description (with its assumed separation between the collective metric objects and minds, and its assumed connections via correspondence), but the practice of connecting and separating which is local, material and always open to challenge (from both humans and non-humans).

When Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen ask the question ‘then who is doing the treating and the inquiring [knowing]?’ their answer is ‘Planet M’ from which they take the title of the paper ‘Planet M: The intense abstraction of Marilyn Strathern.’ This paper is directly concerned with comparison, and how it contributes to knowledge if we reject abstraction as the cutting of properties from objects (or in grammar cutting predicates from subjects). According to Holbraad and Pedersen, Strathern also rejects an understanding of comparison which would hold number as the ultimate/universal abstraction, the cutting off of the most foundational property of all things: extension. They argue that Strathern offers an alternative. Their Strathern develops comparison by sharing some of the power of objects with subjects. This power is the ability to express oneself at the same time as the means of that expression. This ‘self’ is considered more like an object in that it becomes able to be interrogated, and hence more able to express itself together with its form of expression.
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Part 1|Part 2|Part 3|Part 4

Comparisons as imperium brings with it the active modern subject (who imposes the comparison), and the passive modern object (who is compared). Such a subject strives to know the world through describing the properties of objects (as objects having properties is the comparison imposed), with the hope of determining modern facts – at which point what objects are and our knowledge of them are one and the same and the comparison is made invisible. The two alternatives to comparison I offer here, begin with transforming the subject/object duality. In doing so they are both concerned with how human and non-humans can live together, without being thrown apart as two entirely separate categories of things (subjects and objects). First, there are participant-comparisons (continually being developed below). Second, there is abstentions (written about in part 4).
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